
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf._....I]?'3 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






V 3 







THE HISTORY 



OF THE 



KNGLISH BIBLE 



BY 



T. HARWOOD PATTISON. 

Professor of HomiUtics and Pastoral Theology in the Rochester 
Theological Seminary 





PHIT.ADEI.PHIA 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

1420 Chestnut Street 

1894 



^ 



5^ 






Entered, according to Act ot Congress, in the year 1894, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



TO S. R. P., 



IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A DEBT WHICH 
CAN NEVER BE PAID. 



1894. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



Preface, . . . . . . . ... . 4 

I. Early Manuscripts, 7 

II. John Wycliffe, . . . • 19 

III. William Tyndale, 31 

IV. COVERDALE, AND THE GrEAT BiBLE, . -53 

V. Queen Elizabeth and the Bishops' 

Bible, 75 

VI. The Authorized Version, ..... 91 

VII. Between the Versions, . .... . 109 

VIII. The English of the Versions, . . . 129 

IX. The Revised Version, 145 

X. The Bible in English Literature, . 169 

XL The Bible and the Nation, . . . . 221 

XII. The Bible in Spiritual Life, . . . 247 
4 



PREFACE. 



In the following pages I am to tell tlie story of 
tlie English Bible from Anglo-Saxon times to our 
own day, and to trace some of the influences 
which it has exercised upon our intellectual, 
national, and spiritual life. 

The story has been told often before, and at 
much greater length than my space allows of 
telling it here. This is especially true of our 
own centur}'. When Christopher Anderson, the 
minister of a Baptist church in Edinburgh, pub- 
lished his ' ' Annals of the English Bible, ' ' in 
1845, ^^ broke comparatively new ground ; and 
did so almost by accident ; for his purpose was to 
write a biography of Tyndale, to which the other 
portions of his work should be supplementar}^ 
The field has been occupied since then by a suc- 
cession of writers, among whom I would mention 
with especial gratitude Canon Westcott, and Dr. 
Eadie. But the increasing number of readers of 
the English Bible will warrant us in telling its 
familiar and fascinating story over and over again. 
What Bishop Butler says of the book itself is not 
less applicable to its history. " It is not incredible 
that a book which has been so long in the posses- 
sion of mankind contains many truths as yet 
undiscovered." 

The chapters upon the influence of the English 
Bible are the natural complement of those which 

6 



6 PREFACE. 

deal with its history. At the present time there is 
a strong disposition to lay stress upon this kind of 
evidence as an argument for the divine origin of 
the book The Bible finds us in our best and 
brightest moods, it inspires our noblest literature, 
it moves us to deeds of purest benevolence and 
loftiest patriotism. No history of our national, 
our social, our intellectual, or our spiritual life can 
be written without a generous recognition of this 
great influence. We exclaim with Heine, " What 
a book ! Vast and wide as the world, rooted in 
the abyss of creation, and towering up beyond 
the blue secrets of heaven. Sunrise and sunset, 
promise and fulfillment, life and death, the whole 
drama of humanity, are in this book." 

So far as I know these two lines of study — the 
history and the influence of our English Bible — 
have not been pursued hitherto in one volume. 
The extent of the ground covered by the present 
writer will account for the omission of many de- 
tails of interest in the history of the English Bible, 
and of many aspects of interest in its influence. 

My own conviction is that back of all questions 
as to inspiration and revelation— with which indeed 
the general reader does not very much concern 
himself — lie the story of the book itself in which 
there is no room for speculation, and the history 
of its influence which is one of our national pos- 
sessions. Whether we think of the liberty which 
comes to us in action or in thought, the words of 
Garibaldi hold good : " The best of allies you 
can procure for us is the Bible ; that will bring us 
the reality of freedom." T. H. P. 

Rochester, April i, 1894. 



I. 

EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 



Friar Pacificus. — It is growing dark ! 

Yet one time more, 

And then my work for to-day is o'er. 

I come again to the name of the Lord ! 

Ere I that awful name record. 

That is spoken so lightly among men, 

Let me pause awhile and wash my pen. 

— -The Golden Legend. 



THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 



CHAPTER I. 

EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 



The history of the English Bible falls naturally 
into two periods, the era of manuscript being 
the first, while the second follows the progress and 
shares the triumphs of the art of printing. With 
each of these periods one great name is inseparably 
connected. Almost a hundred years before Wil- 
liam Caxton set up his rude press at the 
sign of the Red Pale in Westminster, ' ' ^*-«-'*'^^ 
John Wycliffe crowned a laborious life by giving to 
the English people the Bible in their own tongue. 
He represents the highest achievement of the man- 
uscript period. Almost fifty years after Caxton 
started his press, William Tyndale, driven from 
England and forced to do his work by stealth on the 
Continent of Europe, succeeded in issu- 
ing the first printed English New Testa- 
ment. To him belongs the honor of consecrating 
the new art to what has since proved to be its 
largest as well as its noblest use. 



10 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

In the days of Wycliffe, the English tongue had 
attained a force and beauty which have scarcely 
been excelled. He is the father of our own best 
prose. But back of Wycliffe lie at least seven 
hundred years of the language, and it is possible to 
find traces in all these centuries of translations 
from the Scriptures. 

It is with this earliest manuscript period that 
we are interested now. Possibly the uncouth 
tongue to which Caesar listened when he landed 
on the shores of Britain became before long 
familiar with the truths of Christianity. Gildas, 
who merits too well the sneer of Gibbon, that he 
'* presumed to exercise the office of historian," 
affirms that when, during the persecu- 
tion under the Emperor Diocletian, 
English Christians went to their death, "all the 
copies of the Holy Scriptures which could be dis- 
covered were burned in the streets. ' ' What is cer- 
tain is that when Alaric took Rome, a 
century later, Christianity found full 
employment for all its energies in disciplining the 
savage hordes that might otherwise have destroyed 
it ; and as a consequence " the task of the transla- 
tion of Scripture among the Northern nations was 
suspended."* 

The oldest manuscript in existence is an English 

1 Westcott, <* A General View of the History of the English Bible," 
p. 5. 



^ D.,A. D. 651. 



EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 11 

Psalter^ partly in prose and partly in verse, pre- 
served in the National I^ibrary at Paris. This 
translation was made by Aldhelm, who died 
bishop of Sherborne in the year 709. But of 
course versions of parts of the Bible may have been 
made earlier than this. The missionaries who 
found their home among the rugged moors of 
Northumbria, no doubt gave to the people in the 
vernacular the truths which they taught them. 
The ruins of lyindisfarne Abbey on Holy Island, 
off the northeast coast of England, 
"the solemn, huge, and dark -red 
pile," so happily characterized by Sir Walter Scott, 
recall the name of Bishop Aidan, who there trained 
laymen as well as priests in reading 
and learning the Scriptures. Bad- "' " 
frith, a later bishop of lyindisfarne, is said to have 
translated most of the books of the Bible. No 
pleasanter story comes to us from those old times 
than that of Caedmon, the cowherd of the Abbey 
of Whitby, the ruins of which still confront the 
gray North Sea, the poor brother, songless and 
dispirited, who sees the harp coming toward him 
at the feast and escapes to the stable, to hear in 
his dream the voice of his master saying, ' ' Sing, 
Caedmon ! sing to me ! " and waking finds that 
with the morning the gift of song has wakened 
too. From the translations made for him by his 
better educated brethren, the humble herdsman 



12 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

versified the histories of the Bible in a tongue 
more robust than rythmical ; but his harp, as Fra 
Angelico's pencil, was never suffered to celebrate 
any other than sacred themes. 

Of all early translators of the 
Bible, Bede retains most freshly 
his chann for the student of to-day. His work 
was done at the monastery of Jarrow, on the river 
Tyne, where even yet, in strange contrast with 
forests of chimneys and furnaces, with an atmos- 
phere poisoned by chemical smoke, and with a 
soil black with cinders, some scanty ruins of his 
church remain. Bede, known in later times as 
the Venerable^ is one of those fascinating charac- 
ters who never grow old. To the frank simplicity 
of the child he added the scholar's range of learn- 
ing, the enthusiasm of a true teacher, and the piety 
of a saint. More than any other one man he made 
North umbria ' ' the literary center of western Eu- 
rope."^ Among the translators before the days of 
printing, he is the only one of whom it can be 
reasonably conjectured that he went for his author- 
ity to the original tongues rather than to the 
I^atin Vulgate. He owned and frequently refers 
to a Greek Codex of the Acts. How much of the 
Bible he translated is uncertain, but we know that 
his last task was on the Gospel of John. For him 
death had no terrors, and yet he bade his scholars, 

^ Green's " History of the English People," Vol. I., p. 64. 



EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 13 

wbo could scarcely study for weeping, learn with 
wliat speed they might, for he felt sure that he 
could not be with them long. His last day was 
spent in dictating his version of John to his scribe, 
and in singing, during the intervals of relief from 
pain, snatches of cheery songs, rude rhymes in his 
own English tongue. When the evening came, 
the boy at his bedside said: "There is 3^et one 
sentence unwritten, dear master." 

' ' Write it quickly, ' ' was Bede's reply. 

And a few moments after the scribe told him all 
was finished : "You speak truth," said his master, 
"all is finished now." 

The last w^ords of the loving evangelist fitly 
closed the life of one so like-minded. They laid 
him on the pavement of his church, where he 
chanted a final doxology, and on its closing words 
his spirit passed to its rest. 

Alfred the Great prefixed to his 
body of lyaws a translation of the 
Ten Commandments, with portions of the three 
following chapters of Bxodus, and his death inter- 
rupted a version of the Psalms on which he was 
engaged. Patriot as well as scholar, Alfred saw 
clearly that no book so surely as the Bible would 
lay the foundations of a native literature, and it 
was his ambition that all the freeborn men in his 
kingdom should be able lo read the English 
tongue. Two versions of the Gospels — the Lin- 



14 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

disfarne or Cuthbert, and the Rush worth, still re- 
main to us as memorials of the art and devotion of 
Northern England in the tenth century. The 
Cuthbert manuscript, once richly illuminated and 
bright with gold and gems, is preserved in the 
British Museum. ^ Originally written in Ivatin, in 
the seventh century, an interlinear Anglo-Saxon 
gloss was added to it between the years 946 and 968, 
by Aldred, a poor priest — indignissimus et Tniserri- 
mus^ he pathetically calls himself — of Holy Island. 

In the "Rush worth Gospels," while the glosses 
of Mark, I^uke, and John follow closely the Cuth- 
bert book, Matthew is given in an independent trans- 
lation. This manuscript again is composed of the 
Ivatin Gospels written by MacRegol, an Irish scribe, 
about 820, and an interlinear translation, added 
eighty or one hundred years later, and of which the 
authors say : " He that of mine profiteth, pray he 
for Owun that this book glossed, and Farmen, the 
priest at Harewood, who has now written the 
book. "2 

A patriot as true of heart as Alfred himself was 
Aelfric, abbot of Peterborough, who afterward 
became archbishop of York, and who ' ' Eng- 
lished," as he terms it, the greater part of the 
Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Esther, Job, 
Judith, and Maccabees. "Englished according 

1 " The English Bible," by John Eadie, D. D., pp. 13, 14. 

2 Eadie, p. 15. 



EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 15 

to my skill for your example," he says as lie pre- 
sents the book of Judith to Baldorman Bthelward, 
*' that you may also defend your country by force 
of arms against the outrage of foreign hosts." 
Perhaps the militant parts of the Bible were in 
his mind when he wrote in his homily ' ' On Read- 
ing the Scriptures," "Happy is he, then, who 
reads the Scriptures, if he convert the words into 
actions."^ 

Aelfric's translation was in circulation in the 
tenth century. One catches in his resolute words 
the spirit of defiance with which Dane and Norse- 
men were met by successive generations of Eng- 
lishmen. That spirit was invoked in vain before 
the resolute will and vast ability of William the 
Conqueror, one of the greatest men of his own, 
or of any age. 

The Norman Conquest affected Eng- 
lish scholarship very much as the vic- 
tories of Alaric, six centuries earlier, affected the 
scholarship of southern Europe. The work of trans- 
lating the Scriptures, even if it did not altogether 
cease, was checked. A new language had to be 
imposed upon the people. The conflict between 
the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman- French was 
not to be settled in a day. Both tongues can be 
traced in fragments of translation yet extant ; and 
in the end, the language which resulted from the 

1 Mombert, " Handbook of The English Version," etc., p. 17. 



16 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

struggle was to all intents and purposes the- lan- 
guage of WycliflFe and Chaucer. Old forms still 
lingered, but only to stamp him who used them as 
uncouth and rustic. The day drew near when a 
translation of the whole Bible of permanent value 
could be made. That such a translation existed 
already is extremely improbable, although Sir 
Thomas More, Foxe the martyrologist, and Arch- 
bishop Cranmer claim that it did. ' ' There are, 
however, two English versions of the Psalter still 
remaining which were made early in the fourteenth 
century, together with many abstracts and metrical 
paraphrases of particular books of the Bible, trans- 
lations of the Epistles and Gospels used in divine 
service, paraphrases of gospel lessons, narratives of 
the passion and resurrection of our I^ord, and other 
means for familiarizing the people with Holy Script- 
ure."^ The English Bible, even in its imperfect 
form, had laid hold of the hearts of the nation 
many years before Wycliffe was born. Preachers 
made free paraphrases for themselves, and no doubt 
did then as preachers have done since, founded 
their discourses upon misconceptions of their 
texts. But still the people found life in the words 
of Scripture, There must have been an unauthor- 
ized version of large parts of the Bible which to 
them carried the authority of law. It is remark- 
able, that while the poet Chaucer frequently quotes 

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, " English Bible." 



EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. 17 

Scripture, he never uses the words of Wycliffe's 
version, nor does even Wycliflfe himself in his 
discourses. 

Naturalists have found a plant in one of the 
Western States which is so exceedingly sensitive to 
any interference with its accustomed life that it 
shows not only uneasiness but even anger when 
moved from one place to another. It quivers with 
displeasure and emits a pungent odor, which drives 
the enemy from its presence. The sensitiveness 
of our language is scarcely less marked. Prefer- 
ring older although less satisfactory translations to 
the noble version of John Wycliffe, the English 
people furnished an early illustration of that con- 
servatism which has been in all their history an 
element alike of national weakness and of na- 
tional strength. The old word was not to be too 
readily abandoned, nor was the new word to be too 
readily adopted in the book which was already so 
dear to their religious experience. We do well to 
notice this disposition to cling to household words 
familiar in the ear, because in all the changes 
through which our Bnglish Bible has passed, from 
IvUtterworth to the Jerusalem Chamber, it has 
been an element with which even the most pru- 
dent of our translators have been forced sooner or 
later to reckon. Kept within bounds, it has warned 
the scholar not to trifle without good cause with 
the pure "well of English undefyled '' ; while, 



18 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

on the other hand, if suffered to thrust the spirit 
of intelligent criticism from its right place, it has 
done incalculable harm. 

It was while the language of England was being 
molded and made ready for Chaucer and Wycliffe, 
that the Bible received the name by which we 
know it to-day. For a time it seemed as if Je- 
rome's title, "The Divine lyibrary,'' would win 
its way to general acceptance ; but in the thirteenth 
century the Greek term ''The Book," passing into 
the vocabulary of the West, became by a slight 
grammatical misapprehension, no longer plural 
but singular. "The Books," in popular use was 
transformed into ' ' The Book ' ' ; not one alone but 
manifold, with an inward rather than an outward 
unity, true throughout its pages to the personal 
characteristics of every writer, and to the Divine 
purpose for the whole. ^ 



1" The Bible in the Church," Brooke Foss Westcott, p. 5. 



II. 

JOHN WYCLIFFE. 



A good man was there of religion, 

And was a poore Parson of a town, 

But rich he was of holy thought and work ; 

He was also a learned man, a clerk. 

— Chaucer. 




John de Wyclipfe, D. D. 

From Life of Wycliffe, by Robert Vaughn, D. D. 

Page 21. 



CHAPTER II. 

JOHN WYCLIFFK. 

The latter half of the fourteenth century is mem- 
orable in the history of popular freedom. The 
monopolies of the favored classes were challenged 
by the people as never before. Italy saw the brief 
but splendid resistance to the nobles led by Rienzi, 
"consul of orphans, widows, and the poor." In 
France, the peasants sublimed to power by de- 
spair, and stimulated alike by hunger and oppres- 
sion rose against their lords, firing their castles 
and murdering their wives and children. The pas- 
sionate appeal against brutal tyranny which cul- 
minated in England in the revolt of Wat Tyler 
was smouldering long years before. The country 
was suffering from famine and plague, and her best 
blood was drained by her wars. How long she 
could endure, and whether indeed the world itself 
was not near its end, were questions on many lips. 
The time, so many thought, must be at hand when 
the Judge would come, if he were not already at 
the gate — 

To terminate the evil, 

To diadem the right. 

21 



22 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

To this England Tolin Wycliffe 

A. D. 1320-1384. -,, , .. ,r .1 

addressed himself as the con- 
. sciousness of his powers and obligations grew upon 
him. Although born in 1320, near Richmond in 
Yorkshire, and not far from the village which still 
bears his name, he matured slowly. Nothing dis- 
tinguishes him more than the self-possession with 
which he moves among the troublous elements 
that he was mastering and controlling for God and 
'' merrie England. ' ' From his peaceful mastership 
of Balliol College, Oxford, he "leaned out his soul 
and listened." Everywhere he saw civil commo- 
tion and ecclesiastical change. The papacy rent 
by internal disputes was ill prepared for resisting 
the growing spirit of revolt in England, whose peo- 
ple would no more brook a foreign usurpation of 
their consciences than they would brook a foreign 
invasion of their soil. In 1356, he began the work 
which has made him famous, by translating the 
Apocalypse, perhaps attracted to that book, as was 
Savonarola in the next century, by the apparent 
fulfillment of its prophecies in his own land and 
age. This was followed by the Gospels with a 
commentary ; and by 1380 he had translated the 
whole New Testament, including a revision of the 
Apocalypse. Wycliffe was now sixty years old, but 
it seemed as though he had lived many lives since 
his public course began. As a statesman, he had 
supported his sovereign in his resistance to the pope, 



JOHN WYCLIFFE. 23 

and had incurred popular disfavor for a time by his 
attachment to John of Gaunt, the most powerful 
noble of his day. As a reformer, he had stimulated 
the revolt of the people against the oppression of 
their superiors, and was charged with giving John 
Ball, the mad priest of Kent, his most powerful ar- 
guments when he inquired in his homely way : 

When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then the gentleman ? 

Since 1361 he had been a parish minister, inces- 
sant in his labors for the welfare of his 'charge. 
Almost a quarter of a century he had given to 
the work of translating, and throughout a period 
of like duration he had been evangelizing England, 
and by means of the itinerant toils of his ' ' poor 
preachers ' ' spreading his doctrines broadcast over 
the land. The Old Testament was added to the 
New in 1384. Apparently it was begun by Wy- 
cliffe's friend and disciple, Nicholas de Hereford, 
who proceeded as far as Baruch 3 : 20, when he 
was forced to lay down his pen at the beginning 
of the verse by a summons to appear before a synod 
of preaching friars, and at their instigation was 
excommunicated. ^ He escaped, and re- 

AD 1382 

turned from Rome to England, but not 

in time to see his old master. Probably Wycliflfe 

himself finished the work begun by Nicholas de 

1 Eadie, Vol. I., p. 64. Stoughton, p. 33, 



24 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Hereford. However that may have been, the trans- 
lation of the Bible completed in 1384 was sub- 
stantially the work of John Wycliflfe. It was fin- 
ished only just in time, for on the 28th of December 
he was stricken with paralysis while hearing ser- 
vice in his own church of lyutterworth, and died 
as the new year was coming in. 

Wycliffe's version was made from the I^atin Vul- 
gate, and from the impure text current in his time. 
Within a few years of his death his followers be- 
came so conscious of its defects, that one of the 
foremost of them, John Purvey, a fellow-sufferer 
with Nicholas de Hereford, prepared a 
■ complete revision which was issued in 
1388. "A simple creature," he says of himself, 
"hath translated the Bible out of I^atin into Eng- 
lish." His quaint account of his method suggests 
some of the soundest principles controlling any 
translation: First, this "simple creature" had 
much travail with divers fellows and helpers to 
gather many old Bibles, and other doctors and 
common glosses, and to make one common Bible 
some deal true ; and then to study it of the new, 
the text with the gloss and other doctors as he 
might get, and specially Lyra on the Old Testa- 
ment, that helped him full much in this work ; the 
third time, to counsel with old grammarians and 
old divines of hard words, senses, how they might 
best be understood and translated ; the fourth time, 



JOHN WYCLIFFE. 25 

to translate as clearly as he could to the sense, and 
to have many good fellows and cunning at the cor- 
recting of the translation.^ According to his fa- 
cilities, his method was that of the more learned 
divines who, centuries later, took up his work in 
the Jerusalem Chamber. 

How untrustworthy the manuscripts of the Vul- 
gate then were is shown by Purvey's statement 
that " the common I^atin Bibles have more need 
to be corrected, as many as I have seen m my 
life, than hath the Latin Bible late translated. ' ' ^ 

We are attracted to Purvey by the simplicity of 
his nature, and by the scholarly modesty that led 
him to "pray for charity and for the common 
profit of Christian souls, that if any wise man find 
any default of the truth of translation, let him set 
in the true sentence." The "simple creature" 
lived an unsettled life, was imprisoned for his 
opinions, and in 1400 recanted at St. Paul's Cross. 
Of the one hundred and fifty copies of his version 
known to us, all appear to have been written be- 
fore 1430, by which time Purvey himself was 
dead. But there must have been many later 
manuscripts, for although proscribed in convocation 
by Archbishop Arundel in 1408, the book was cir- 
culated widely, and more than any other version 
was the Bible of the English people, until the 
printing press gave the place of honor to the trans- 

1 Westcott, p. 16. 2 Ibid., p. 18. 



26 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

lation of William Tyndale in the next century. 
The work of Wycliffe and of Purvey was done at 
a time when the thought of the nation, as well as 
its speech, was in a state of transition. Transla- 
ting- as they did, not from the original, but from 
the Vulgate, there are traces in their versions 
of ecclesiastical dominance and of theological 
error. The word clergy^ which stout James Mel- 
ville the Presbyterian said smelled of papistry, al- 
though used by the congregation of believers, fre- 
quently occurs, so does sacrament where later ver- 
sions use mystery (i Tim. 3:9); and penance 
for repentance ; and priests for elders (Titus i : 5). 
But there is often music in the sentences which 
once heard cannot soon be forgotten, as when the 
man ctred of blindness at the pool of Siloam, 
says: ^^ I wente^ and waischid^ and saV^ There 
is a tenderness lacking in later versions, in 
Persida^ moost dere worthe womman (Romans 16 : 
12). The play on language is very effective in 
such a verse as Alle thingis ben nedeful to me^ but 
not alle thingis ben spedeful (i Cor. 6 : 12) ; and 
there is sound teaching in making Paul say (i Cor. 
14 : 38) : If ony man unknoweth^ he schal be un^ 
knoweit^ where in our later version we read, If any 
man be ignorant^ let him be ignorant. The noble 
description of Moses' old age in our version is per- 
haps more dignified, but it is certainly not more 
graphic than Wycliffe's : Moises was of an hun- 



JOHN WYCLIFFE. 27 

drid and twentie yeer whanne he diede ; his ize 
dasewide not^ nether his teeth weren stirid. ^ 

That WyclifFe's Bible should be inferior to our 
authorized version is not to be wondered at. Even 
had he been one only among a large and learned 
company, and favored with royal patronage as well 
as with scholarly leisure, this would have been 
natural. We must consider under what disad- 
vantages he worked. How rapidly at that time 
the language was changing is seen at once by con- 
trasting his earliest version, of 1380, with that of 
Purvey of 1388. But the impulse sprang from 
peaceful I^utterv/orth to which we are indebted 
for our Bible to-day. Priestly proscriptions were 
powerless to arrest the circulation of the book, 
which found most favor in Purvey's revision. 
Some of the copies still extant, to judge from their 
size, were evidently the friends and companions of 
their owners in the home and on the road ; but 
others were counted fit to be the gifts of princes.^ 
Foxe is no doubt right in saying that within thirty- 
six years of its first publication by WyclifFe, the 
sweetness of God's word had been tasted by great 
multitudes, and that to read and hear it well-dis- 
posed hearts sat up all night. To obtain the book 
in England "some gave five marks [about two 
hundred dollars] some more, some less for a book ; 

1 " The Bibles of England," by Andrew Edgar, D D., p. 8, et seq. 

2 Westcott, p. 24. 



28 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. 
James or of St. Paul." 

Wycliffe's work was all done between the years 
1356 and 1384, and probably no Englishman in so 
short a time has made so deep and lasting an im- 
pression on his land and age. He stands at the 
source and fountain head of the Protestant Reform- 
ation, and draws his faith direct from the pages 
which he translates. If he anticipates IvUther at 
the desk, he anticipates Wesley in the field, and 
sends out his itinerants preaching, bare of foot and 
clad in unbleached russet, to evangelize the land. 
While his wide and generous scholarship taught 
him to reverence human reason, his temperament 
and training taught him equally to reverence au- 
thority. The first may have made him a Protestant, 
but the second kept him in humble submission to 
the Scriptures. His preachers bore with them on 
their journeys the conviction that their master in- 
culcated nothing which he had not first experi- 
enced himself. With a frame as frail as Calvin's, 
he possessed not a little of the same restless en- 
ergy, indomitable will, and impetuous spirit. At 
the same time he had popular gifts, geniality, 
humor, audacity, a love of the right, a hatred of 
all falsehoods and fraud, a wealth of invective 
and of persuasion, which bespoke his English 
blood. Our space has allowed us only to glance 
at the mighty influence which John Wycliffe ex- 



JOHN WYCLIFFE. 29 

erted not only upon his own country, but also upon 
the whole continent of Europe. Heroic John Huss 
gave utterance to the feelings of thousands of de- 
vout souls when he said, in refusing to condemn 
Wycliffe : "I am content that my soul should be 
where his soul is. ' ' He came to an age which 
many different influences had combined to make 
ready for his message. Speaking at the Wycliffe 
Commemoration, in 1881, Dr. Stoughton said : 
' ' There was an intellectual activity — there was 
spiritual life throughout the period. The nadir 
was in the tenth century ; the fourteenth saw the 
dawn of modern civilization. Society then ap- 
pears on the move ; feudalism was in decay ; cities 
were rejoicing in newly sealed charters. Parlia- 
ments in England were asserting their rights ; 
commerce had left its cradle full of energy and 
life. The springtime of poetry had opened, and 
Chaucer had gathered the crocuses and snowdrops. 
God every now and then sends some strong man 
into the world to do much needed work. The 
hour calls for the man, and the man comes 
to meet the hour. The Divine hand that strikes 
the bell creates the representative fitted to obey the 
summons. God struck the hour for the Reforma- 
tion in the sixteenth century, and Euther appeared. 
A hundred and fifty years earlier, and the bell 
rung for a reformer before the Reformation. Be- 
hold John Wycliffe in answer to that signal ! '' 



30 THE HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

In his passion for the Scriptures as contain- 
ing the words and will of God, he rose above all 
national distinctions, and from the higher plane of 
citizenship with the whole world, he dared look 
forward through the troubled times in which he 
lived and utter those noble words, which await 
even yet their full accomplishment: "I am as- 
sured that the truth of the gospel may indeed for 
a time be cast down in particular places, and may 
for a while abide in silence ; but extinguished it 
never can be. For the Truth itself has said : 
Heaven and earth shall pass away^ but my word 
shall never pass away. ^* 



III. 

WILLIAM TYNDALE. 



Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave ; 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 

In roarings round the coral reef. 

— Tennyson, 




William Tyndale. 
Page 33. 



CHAPTER III. 

WILLIAM TYNDALE. 

Our Btiglisli Bible in its printed form was born 
in exile. The country which, more than any other, 
was to be distinguished in after years for its zeal 
in printing and circulating the Scriptures was late 
in entering the lists. The laboring sounds of 
Caxton's press had been heard for more than half 
a century before an edition of the New Testament 
in the vernacular was printed in England. She 
was nourishing her faith on manuscript copies of 
the Wycliffe versions long after the time when 
Bibles were printed in French, German, Dutch, 
Italian, and other continental languages. 

In the year 1524, a scholarly Englishman, in the 
early prime of his powers, came to the busy Ger- 
man city of Hamburg, which was already famous 
as a stronghold of Protestantism. 

TT* TTT-1T Arv J 1 A. D. 1484—1536. 

His name was William Tyndale. 
He was born in 1484, in some quiet little village 
in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, and it 
is likely that he had flowing in his veins the Ger- 
man blood which has done so much for the honor of 
both the Old World and the New. He was ' ' brought 
up from a child," says Foxe, " in the University of 

c 33' 



34 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Oxford, and then went to Cambridge." From the 
first he was singularly addicted to the study of the 
Scriptures. At the manor house of 
lyittle Sodbury, still standing in his 
native county, he acted as tutor in the family of 
Sir John Walsh. Here his enthusiasm for the Bible 
often brought him into trouble in the dining hall, 
where he loved to challenge the priests sitting 
around the table to make good their doctrines from 
Scripture. The outspoken young scholar caused 
many an uneasy hour to the lady of the house, 
who would remind him that learned doctors, 
worth hundreds of pounds, held views the very 
opposite of his ; and ' ' were it reason, think you, 
that we should believe you before them?" But 
Tyndale was even then possessed by the ambition 
to give to England a Bible which not only wealthy 
ecclesiastics, but poor peasants also might read. 
''If God spares my life," said he to one of those 
priests, ' ' ere many years I will cause the boy who 
driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures 
than you do." At Cambridge he had listened to 
the sentiment of which this was an echo as it fell 
from the lips of the famous Erasmus. "I wish," 
the great Greek scholar had said, alluding to the 
Gospels and Epistles, " that the husbandman may 
sing them at his plough, that the weaver may warble 
them at his shuttle, that the traveler may with 
their narration beguile the weariness of the way. ' * 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 35 

T^'ndale was no dreamer or fanatic. In giving 
his life to the fulfillment of his project, he had 
done so under the conviction that ' ' it was impos- 
sible to establish the lay people in any truth, except 
the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes 
in their mother tongue. . . This thing only 
moved me to translate the New Testament." ^ 

No doubt lyady Walsh was relieved when her 
tutor took his departure for London. He had 
heard Tunstall, bishop of England, praised for his 
learning by Erasmus. In those days the bishop's 
palace was often the home of poor young scholars 
waiting for the flood-tide of a better fortune. But 
Tunstall had no room for Tyndale. It happened, 
however, that an alderman of the city, Humphrey 
Monmouth, heard him preach a few times, and 
was so pleased with his doctrine that, on Tyn- 
dale's entreaty, he took him into his house. Mon- 
mouth was already a Protestant. It is of him that 
lyatimer, in one of his sermons, tells the pleasant 
story that, meeting a poor neighbor of his, who 
lost no opportunity to abuse him for his opposition 
to Rome, he seized him by the hand and spoke so 
tenderly to him that the heart of his enemy melted, 
and falling on his knees asked his forgiveness. 
Monmouth engaged Tyndale to pray for the souls 
of his father and mother — ''and all Christian 
souls ' ' — for ten pounds sterling, and in such 

^ Westcott, p. 33. 



36 THE HISTOEY OF THE E25GLLSH BIBLE. 

duties, and in hard study day and night, half a 
year passed. What Gloucestershire had failed to 
yield him, however, I/)ndon also refused ; and in 
his own words, the simple-minded, unworldly 
scholar " understood at the last not only that there 
was no room in my lord of London's palace to 
translate the New Testament, but also that there 
was no place to do it in all England. ' ' ^ 

So it came about that in the year 

A. D. 1524<. 

1524, Tyndale exchanged the hospi- 
tality of the lyondon merchant for what he pa- 
thetically calls, ' ' Mine exile out of mine natural 
country, and bitter absence from my friends." 
He left lyondon and carried his precious manu- 
scripts to Hamburg. 

During the time that he spent here he seems to 
have published separately the Gospels 
■ of Matthew and Mark. In the year 1525 
we find him at Cologne, where he was engaged in 
printing the translation of the entire New Testa- 
ment. But the difficulties which had beset him 
in his native land, and which very likely may have 
driven him from Hamburg, followed him still. 
His project came to the ears of a deacon of the 
Church of the Blessed Virgin at Frankfort, one 
Cochlaeus, whose enmity to the Reformation was 
roused to the highest pitch by hearing that there 
were two Englishmen at Cologne about whom the 

1 " Our English Bible," John Stoughton, D. D., p. 76. 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 37 

printers in their less sober moments would boast 
that before very long, whatever king or cardinal 
might say, they would make all England IvUth- 
eran. Cochlaeus himself describes how far the 
printing had proceeded : ' ' Calling certain printers 
into his lodging, after they were heated with wine, 
one of them in more privat discours, discovered to 
him (that is, to Cochlaeus himself) the secret by 
which all England was to be drawn over to the side 
of lyUther — namely, that three thousand copies of 
the lyUtheran New Testament, translated into the 
English language, were in the press, and already 
were advanced as far as the letter K^ in ordine 
qMaternionemy Cochlaeus adds that the expense 
of this undertaking was met by English mer- 
chants, who were to receive the books and se- 
cretly distribute them " throughout all England." 
The two Englishmen thus betrayed by the bab- 
bling printers were Tyndale and an amanuensis, 
Roye or Joye. The city authorities promptly 
stopped the printing; and Cochlaeus wrote warn- 
ing letters to the king of England, Cardinal Wolsey, 
and Bishop Fisher, so that they might ' ' prevent 
the importation of the pernicious merchandise. ' ' ^ 
Persecuted in one city, Tyndale was still able to 
flee to another. Hastily gathering up the sheets 
already printed of his "pernicious merchandise," 

1 '* The Annals of the English Bible," Christopher Anderson, 1845, 
Vol. I., p. 60. 



38 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

he took ship on the Rhine, and following Luther- 
anism to its headquarters, reached Worms, where 
four years earlier the great Reformer had triumph- 
antly defended his doctrines before Charles V. , and 
where now the new art of printing was being 
carried to great perfection. A scholarly German 
traveler in 1526 notes in his journal that at a din- 
ner table where he was entertained, one of the 
guests told him that an Englishman living with 
two of his countrymen at Worms, had translated 
the New Testament, and that six thousand copies 
had been printed, and that for all the king opposed 
it, the English were so eager for the gospel as to 
affirm that they would buy a New Testament, 
even if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces 
of money for it." ^ 

Resuming at Worms the work interrupted at 
Cologne, Tyndale determined to issue 
■ two editions of the New Testament. 
The printing of the first, a quarto, had been begun 
by Guentel before Tyndale's flight: The second, 
an octavo, was executed entirely at Worms by P. 
Schoefifer, the son of one of the first great triumvi- 
rate of printers. This edition was the first to be 
issued. D' Aubigne probably surmises rightly when 
he says: "As Tyndale's enemies would have 
marked the edition — the quarto begun at Cologne — 
some few sheets of it having fallen into their hands, 

1 Westcott, p. 41. 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 39 

he took steps to mislead the inquisitors, and began 
a new edition. ' ' This is borne out by what Tyndale 
himself says in a letter to the reader at the end of 
his octavo : '^ Count it as a thing not having his 
full shape, but, as it were, born afore his time, even 
as a thing begun rather than finished." ^ 

Of this little octavo volume, which has been 
called " the most interesting book in the lan- 
guage," the Baptist College at Bristol, England, 
possesses the only perfect copy known to be in ex- 
istence. Although it has been admirably repro- 
duced in fac simile^ yet to see the original itself, 
guarded as one guards a priceless jewel, it is worth 
while to make a special pilgrimage to the old city 
on the Avon. The historian of the college tells its 
story : ' ' The precious volume, worth much more 
than its weight in gold, was originally in the 
Harleian collection. It was obtained for the Earl 
of Oxford by one of the many agents ^vhom he 
employed in hunting for old and rare books. The 
earl had long wished for such a treasure, and was 
so pleased when he found himself in actual posses- 
sion of it,that he bestowed upon "the fortunate finder 
an annuity of twenty pounds. It is stated that Os- 
borne the bookseller, purchased the Harleian li- 
brary for less than the earl had spent on the bind- 

1 " History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Centur}^" J. H. 
Merle D'Aubigne, D. D. Ed. Religious Tract Soc, London, Vol. 
v., chap. 8-IO. 



40 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

ings, and that to insure a speedy sale, he cata- 
logued all the books at a remarkably low figure. 
Not recognizing the value of this particular book, 
he priced it at fifteen shillings. It passed into the 
hands of the antiquary, J. Ames, and at his death, 
into the hands of a Mr. White, who gave fourteen 
guineas for it." ^ Mr. White sold it to his friend. 
Dr. Gifford, a Baptist minister of much repute in 
his day, for twenty guineas, and Dr. Gifford placed 
it in the college library. 

Bearing no translator's name, the two editions 
stole into England in the spring of 1526. I/ce, 
afterward archbishop of York, was traveling on the 
continent at the time, and hearing of the " perni- 
cious merchandise " on its way across the German 
Ocean, wrote to King Henry VIII. to warn him. 
'* I need not to advertise your grace what infection 
may ensue hereby if it be not withstanded. All 
our forefathers, governors of the Church of Eng- 
land, have with all diligence forbid and eschewed 
publication of English Bibles. ' ' 

The merchants were importing copies, agents 
all over the southeast of England were selling 
them, the people were eager to buy. Sir Thomas 
More attacked Tyndale for the Protestantism which 
cropped out in his translations. Tunstall, bishop 

1 " Faithful Men : Memorials of Bristol Baptist College," S. A., 
Swaine, pp. 7-12. 

2 Westcott, pp. 40, 41. 



WILLI A.M TYNDALE. 41 

of lyondon, assured the crowds gathered about the 
preaching place at Paul's Cross, that he alone had 
found two hundred errors in it. He and the arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, Warham, ordered that all 
copies should at once be given up. Thomas Gar- 
ret, a curate in Ivondon, was tracked by Cardinal 
Wolsey from the metropolis to Oxford where he 
had gone to sell copies of the book ' ' to such as he 
knew to be lovers of the gospel. ' ' Casting off his 
hood and gown, and disguised by a friend who has 
left us the graphic picture, " in a sleeved coat of 
mine of fine cloth in grain which my mother had 
given me," Garret fled. His friend, Dalabor, shut- 
ting his chamber door, went into his study, and 
with his Testament in his hand kneeled down and 
committed to God his brother " and the tender and 
lately born little flock in Oxford. This done I laid 
aside my book safe. " All in vain, however. Both 
Garret and Dalabor were apprehended and with 
others who later again proved firm in the faith 
did penance in procession. The book was flung 
on the^fire. The same ceremony with another 
set of performers was enacted soon after outside St. 
Paul's Cathedral, London. Wolsey was present, 
sitting clothed in purple on a great platform, sur- 
rounded by abbots, friars, and bishops. Fisher, 
bishop of Rochester, fulminated from a new pulpit 
against lyUther and his heresy, and great baskets 
full of New Testaments were burned. ' ' Rochester 



42 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and his holy brethren," said Tyndale, when the 
news reached him, "have burnt Christ's Testa- 
ment ; an evident sign verily that they would have 
burnt Christ himself also if they had had him. ' ' 

It seems that these copies of the New Testament 
were mostly bought up at Antwerp, where Tyndale 
was now living. Hall, the old chronicler, is our 
authority for the story that Packington, an agent 
of the bishops who were bent on destroying the 
book, — ''a gracious and blessed deed," said Nix, 
bishop of Norwich, ^ — came to Tyndale at Antwerp 
and purchased the Testaments from him direct. 
" Forward went the bargain," he says; " the bish- 
ops had the books, Packington had the thanks, 
and Tyndale had the money." To sell them this 
translator would be nothing loth, as he was al- 
ready anxious to bring out a new and revised edi- 
tion of his work. What is certain is that the 
bishops did buy up all the books that they could 
find, and that their scheme failed in its purpose. 
Nix who was paid heavily to have the " pernicious 
merchandise " destroyed, wrote in 1527 to the arch- 
bishop that something more must be done. It was 
reported by many that even the king himself 
' ' wolde that they shulde have the arroneous 
boks" ; and "marchants, and such that had ther 
abyding not ferre from the see " were greatly in- 
fected ; and from the college at Cambridge which 
sent the most priests into his diocese not one had 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 43 

come into Norfolk lately "but saverith of the 
frying pan, tho' lie speke never so holely." ^ 

Meanwhile the work of printing went forward. 
Tyndale's New Testament was reprinted without 
his leave three times before 1528, and in 1534 by 
his former friend and ally, George Joye, with whom 
there was henceforth a very bitter feud. ''One 
brought me a copy " (of Joye's edition) says Tyn- 
dale, ' ' and showed me so many places in such wise 
altered that I was astonied, and wondered not a 
little what fury had driven him to make such a 
change, and to call it a ' diligent correction. ' ' ' 
Joye, not to be beaten, published what he called 
'*'an apology made, by George Joye to satisfy if it 
may be William Tyndale ; to purge and defend 
himself against so many slanderous lies figured 
upon him in Tyndale's uncharitable and unsober 
epistle.'' 

In 1530, Tyndale, turning his attention to the 
Old Testament, published his English Pentateuch. 
In this he probably had the assistance of stauncher 
friends than Joye, and also used largely Purvey 's 
manuscript version. The book of Jonah appeared 
in 1534, which closed his labors on the English 
Bible, with the exception of a revision 
of Genesis, and the revised New Testa- 
ment which he sent out in the same year. This 
has been well called " altogether Tyndale's noblest 

^ Strype's " Cranmer," quoted by Westcott, p. 53, 



44 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

monument. " ^ A merchant adventurer of Antwerp, 
who had suffered for selling Tyndale's books, ap- 
pealed to Anne Boleyn, now queen of Henry VIII. , 
and as much interested in the Reformation as her 
shallow and guilty nature allowed her to be ; and 
in gratitude for her favors to his friend, Tyndale 
struck off for her private use a copy of his crown- 
ing work on vellum, beautifully illuminated. 
Her name, in faded red letters, may still be deci- 
phered on the gilded edges of the book. Before 
two years were over she had been beheaded in the 
Tower of lyondon, and Tyndale had been stran- 
gled in the Belgian Castle of Vilvoorden. He was 
lodging at the house of Poyntz, an English mer- 
chant, when he was betrayed by a fellow-country- 
man named Phillips, to whom he had lent money, 
and with whom he at the moment of his capture 
was going out to dine, counting him "human, 
handsomely learned, and very conformable." 
Poyntz returning home, learned from the officers 
who had apprehended Tyndale all that had hap- 
pened, and how he had been carried off to Vil- 
voorden, eighteen miles away, and imprisoned. 
Thirteen years the brave translator worked in 
exile ; and the last sixteen months he lay in the 
dungeon craving in words which recall Paul's, 
' ' a warmer cap, being afflicted with a perpetual 
catarrh, a warmer coat also, for that which I have 
1 Westcott, p. 185. 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 45 

is very thin, and also a candle in the evening, for 
it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But 
above all, I entreat and beseech that the procu- 
reur may kindly permit me to have my Hebrew 
Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, 
that I may spend my time with that study. ^ It 
was in vain that faithful Poyntz petitioned King 
Henry VHI. to interpose, assuring His Majesty 
that he had no truer-hearted subject. Tyndale 
was in the clutches of his life-long enemies, and 
for him there was now only one pathway of 
escape. On Friday, the sixth of October, they 
brought him from the cell where he had spent so 
many cold and dreary hours, and bound him to 
the stake. Before the executioner strangled him, 
Tyndale cried with a fervent zeal and a loud voice, 
" lyord, open the king of England's eyes ! " After 
he was dead his body was burned on the spot. At 
that very time, and no doubt known to Tyndale, 
the first volume of Holy Scripture printed 

• T> 1 A A-i.' c \' A. D. 1536. 

m Kngland, an edition oi his own re- 
vised New Testament, was passing through the 
press. It was printed by John Godfrey, and clos- 
ing with the words, ' ' God save the King and all 
his well-willers, " was itself the best answer to the 
martyr's dying prayer. 

Tyndale was emphatically a man of one idea. To 
put the Bible into the English tongue and make it a 

1 Demaus' " William Tyndale, a Biography," p. 475-6. 



46 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

household word in his native land was the ambi- 
tion of his life. He was willing to be an exile 
himself if only by being so the Scriptures might 
make their home there. He was not like Wycliffe, 
a man of affairs, a statesman, an organizer. Better 
than any other of the great Englishmen who have 
been translators of the Bible, Tyndale represents 
the scholar, pure and simple. He had the schol- 
ar's indiffference to comfort and disregard of little 
courtesies of life. His host, Humphrey Mon- 
mouth, says of him: "He studied most part of 
the day and of the night at his book ; and he 
would eat but sodden meat by his good will, nor 
drink but small single beer. I never saw him 
wear linen about him in the space he was with 
me." Thomas Poyntz, his friend at Antwerp, 
tells us how Phillips, on the morning when he 
betrayed him, with a baseness worthy of Judas 
Iscariot, desired Tyndale to lend him forty shil- 
lings, " for," said he, " I lost my purse this morn- 
ing coming over at the passage between this and 
Mechlin. " " So, " adds Poyntz, " Master Tyndale 
took him forty shillings, the which was easy to be 
had of him if he had it ; for in the wily subtilties 
of this world he was simple and unexpert."^ In 
his devotion to the absorbing purpose of his life 
Tyndale no doubt may have been rude and abrupt 
in speech when he spoke at all, and we have seen 

1 Demaus' ** Tyndale," p. 422. 



WILLIAM TYXDALE. 47 

how he could flame up when provoked by those 
who would rob him of his scholar's honors, and 
saddle upon him the burden of their own inca- 
pacity. His bitterest foe could scarcely draw a 
less flattering portrait of him than he drew with 
his own pencil when he pictured himself as " evil 
favored in this world and without grace in the 
sight of men, speechless and rude, dull and slow- 
witted. "^ 

But the translation of Tyndale marks a distinct 
advance in the history of the English Bible, not 
only or chiefly because it had the advantage of the 
printing press, but because of its own excellencies. 
With the possible exception of Bede, Tyndale first 
among English translators turned for his authority 
to two oripfinal lang^uagfes. Before he 

. o & ^ AD 1516 

left Cambridge, Erasmus, his master 
and model, had published the Greek Testament, 
with a new Latin version.^ He has been charged 
with drawing his inspiration from Luther, but 
some years before Luther's Bible appeared, Tyn- 
dale^s mind was full of the purpose of translating 
the New Testament, and between his work and 
that of the German Reformer there are only 
such points of resemblance as are natural in the 
work of men so like-minded as were they. It was 
to the Greek text of Erasmus and to his Latin 

1 J. R. Dore, "Old Bible," p. i8. 

2 Westcott, pp. 32, 179. 



48 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

version that Tyndale turned when he set himself 
to his task. The young scholar who came up to 
I^ondon to push his fortunes with Bishop Tunstall 
on the strength of a translation which he had made 
from Socrates, would appreciate the man who, of 
all others, gave color to the statement that in that 
age of quickened intellectual life " Greece had 
risen from the grave with the New Testament in 
her hand." The title-page of Tyndale's revised 
New Testament runs thus : The New Testament^ 
diligently corrected and compared with the Greek^ 
by William Tyndale^ and Ji7tished in the year of 
our Lord God^ 1534-^ ^^ l^^ month of November. 
What he understands by correction and comparison 
he explains in his "Epistle to the Reader," from 
which a few sentences may be quoted : ' ' Here 
hast thou, most dear reader, the New Testament 
or Covenant made with us of God in Christ's blood, 
which I have looked over now again at the last, 
with all diligence, and compared it unto the Greek, 
and have weeded out of it many faults, which lack 
of help at the beginning or oversight did sow 
therein." There is a touch of humor in what 
follows : ^ ' If any mind find fault, either with the 
translation or aught beside (which is easier for many 
to do than so well to have translated it themselves 
of their own pregnant wits at. the beginning with- 
out an ensample), to the same it shall be lawful tc 
translate it themselves, and to put what they lust 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 49 

thereto. If I shall perceive, either by myself or 
by the information of others, that aught be es- 
caped me, or might more plainly be translated, I 
will shortly after cause it to be mended." ^ Prob- 
ably he had the piratical incursions of Joye in his 
mind when he wrote this, for in a further address 
" yet once again to the Christian reader," he says : 
' ' Wherefore I beseech George Joye, yea, and all 
others too, for to translate the Scriptures for them- 
selves, whether out of Greek, I^atin, or Hebrew. 
Or, if they will needs, ... let them take my 
translations and labours, and change, and alter, and 
correct, and corrupt at their pleasure, and call it 
their own translations and put their own names, 
and not to play bo-peep after George Joye's man- 
ner. " Tyndale did well to be angry, for Joye's al- 
terations Were such as of his own will he himself 
would never have made, ' ' though the whole 
world," as he says, *' should be given me for my 
labour. ' ' ^ 

With Hebrew, Tyndale was not familiar in his 
early life. He was leaving his native land for- 
ever when the chair of Hebrew was revived at 
the University of Cambridge. Four years later, 
however, when maintaining the duty of the trans- 
lator to turn to the original languages for his au- 
thority, he says : ' ' The Greek tongue agreeth 

1 Demaus' " Tyndale," p. 392. 

2 Westcott, p. 69. 

D 



50 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

more with the English than the I^atin, and the 
properties of the Hebrew tongue agree a thousand 
times more with the English than the Latin. "^ 
It is probable that he learned his Hebrew from 
Jewish scholars at some of the German cities 
where he lived. We remember how, from his 
prison in Vilvoorden Castle, he sent for his Hebrew 
grammar and dictionary. This suggests that he 
was studying to the very last, and aspiring to merit 
the character which had been given him ten years 
before : ' ' An Englishman who was so complete a 
master of seven languages, Hebrew, Greek, Eatin, 
Italian, Spanish, English, and French, that you 
would fancy that whichever one he spoke in was 
his mother tongue." 

The disputes between Tyndale and Joye add 
pungency to the history of the quarrels of authors. 
Our sympathy is enlisted on the side of the guile- 
less student who saw his own familiar friend and 
scholar arrayed in his robes, and bringing discredit 
on their rightful owner. But for one forward step 
in the annals of our Bible we seem to be indebted 
to Joye. He pleaded for the book to be published 
without note or comment. In a vigorous defense 
of his course, he says : "As for me, in good faith, 
I had as lief put the truth in the text as in the 
margent ; and except the gloss expand the text, or 
where the text is plain enough, I had as lief 

1 Westcott, p. 174. 



WILLIAM TYNDALE. 51 

leave such frivole glosses clean out. I would tlie 
Scriptures were so purely and plainly translated 
that it needed neither note, gloss, nor scholia, so 
that the reader might once swim without a cork." 
The hint was not thrown away upon one who had 
declared years before that ' ' to give the people the 
bare text of Scriptures, he would offer his body to 
suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death His 
Grace (Henry VHI.) would, so that this be ob- 
tained."^ A prisoner himself, and only to be set 
free by the executioner, Tyndale's last act was 
to give the Bible liberty, and to trust it to de- 
fend itself. The edition of 1535, in which for the 
first time headings were prefixed to the chapters in 
the Gospels and the Acts, was happier than any 
of its predecessors, in being issued without mar- 
ginal notes. Joye was right. The reader of the 
Bible could be safely trusted to swim without 
corks. But an immense advance was made when 
the book was put into the hands of the people in 
their own language, and left to its own simple, un- 
aided strength. They could tell now for them- 
selves what authority their preachers had for their 
loose paraphrases and ingenious perversions of the 
Scripture. The revised New Testament, with 
which William Tyndale crowned his life of single- 
hearted devotion, was a plea for the right of private 
judgment as well as for the authority of the Script- 

1 Demaus, p. 410, 



52 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

ures. It was the most eloquent proof of the trans- 
lator's faith in IvUther's declaration that '4t is al- 
ways better to see with one's own eyes than with 
those of other people." 




IV. 

THE GREAT BIBLE. 



Now I begin to taste of Holy Scriptures; now, 
honour be to God, I am set to the most sweet smell of 
holy letters. . . . Nothing in the world I desire 
but books as concerning my learning : they once had, 
I do not doubt but Almighty God shall perform that 
in me which he of his most plentiful favour and grace 
hath begun. — Miles Cover dale. 




Miles Covbrdale. 
Page 55. 



CHAPTER IV. 

COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBI.E. 

Tyndale was martyred, but the work so dear 
to his heart went on. In his prison at Vilvoor- 
den, the news may have reached him that what 
he aimed at was actually accomplished. On the 
fourth of October, 1535, a year before his death, 
the first complete Bible printed in the English lan- 
guage was published. Advancing no claim to 
such thorough scholarship as distinguished the 
work of Tyndale, this translation was confess- 
edly made from the German and I^atin, by King 
Henry's "humble subject and daylye oratour, 
Myles Coverdale. "^ It is his story that we are 
now to tell. 

Born under the shadow of the 
fine old monaster}^ of Coverham, 
in Yorkshire, and bearing a name given to the 
whole district and still to be read on headstones 
in the village churchyard, Miles Coverdale was 
>'et }'^oung when he was sent to complete his 
studies at the Augustinian monastery in Cam- 
bridge. Here, if not earlier, he would naturally 
recei\'e a powerful impulse toward the Protestant 

1 Dore, " Old Bibles," p. 88. 

56 



6Q THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

doctrines, as well as toward the new learning 
which Erasmus had quickened in the university. 
Dr. Robert Barnes, who was at the head of the 
monastery, was earnest in circulating Tyndale's 
New Testament, likening the Latin version to " a 
cymbal tinkling and brass sounding." For in- 
veighing against the luxury of Cardinal Wolsey, 
and for having the obnoxious books in his posses- 
sion, Barnes was persecuted in 1526, and before 
the terrible vision of the stake abjured and bore 
his fagot among the penitents in the Bible burn- 
ing at St. Paul's. Fourteen years later he played 
the man courageously and was martyred with his 
friend Garrett, two days after the execution of 
Thomas Cromwell, the powerful statesman, who 
with all his faults of arrogant ambition and time- 
serving, did more than any other public man to 
advance the Protestant Reformation in England. 
Coverdale was from the beginning a reformer. 
''He was active," says Dore, "in searching 
out those who had not in obedience to King 
Henry VIII. 's order defaced the name of St. 
Thomas a Beckett in their office books ; so care- 
fully was this done that the owner of a prymer 
in my possession, to be quite safe, scribbled over the 
name of St. Thomas the apostle, as well as St. 
Thomas of Canterbury." From the beginning, 
also, Coverdale was sustained in the work which 
he did by the patronage of others. If Barnes 



57 

influenced him in his Protestant convictions, those 
who were far more powerful than the head of the 
Augtistinian house aided him in his work as a 
translator of the Bible. Cromwell was his friend 
at a time when the friendship of the great minister 
meant everything. Cranmer, raised to be arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, if he did not directly ap- 
prove Coverdale's labors, was an ardent champion 
of the English Bible. His master, Henry VIII. , was 
just then fascinated with "his dearest first wife and 
most virtuous princess. Queen Anne, ' ' and it is in 
these words that Coverdale refers to his patroness 
in the dedication of his Bible. How soon that 
fascination died away is pathetically illustrated 
by the fact that within a year the dedication bore 
the name of Queen Jane, who was married to the 
fickle king in 1536. 

Seven years earlier than this, Coverdale appears 
to have left England for the Continent, and there 
for some time his work was carried on. Possibly 
he met Tyndale in 1529 at Hamburg, and helped 
him on the Pentateuch ; but this is uncertain. We 
know that already his mind was full of his great 
enterprise, and his quick impressionable nature was 
fired with zeal for its accomplisment. ' ' Nothing 
in the world," he writes to Cromwell, " I desire 
but books as concerning my learning : they once 
had, I do not doubt but Almighty God shall per- 
form, that in me which he of his plentiful favour 



58 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and grace hath begun. ' ' ^ A much nobler man 
than Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, had intro- 
duced Coverdale to the minister, and it is proba- 
ble that both of them urged upon him the speedy 
completion of his work. By 1534, he tells Cromwell 
that his manuscript is ready for the press. The 
printing was finished in October of the following 
year. 

The same mystery which veils so much of the 
early Bible work hangs about Coverdale's first 
Bible. It is even uncertain where it was printed. 
At Frankfort, Zurich, Antwerp — which? A recent 
discovery has proved conclusively that Jacob Van 
Meteren, of Antwerp, was at this time employed 
in producing a translation of the Bible, and that 
for this purpose he employed ' ' a certain learned 
scholar named Miles Coverdale. ' ' ^ This makes 
it most likely that our first English Bible was 
printed in the same city in which Tyndale had 
been betrayed. In order to conform with an Act of 
Parliament prohibiting the introduction of bound 
books into England, Meteren sent the sheets to 
Nicholson of Southwark, by whom they were 
made up and published. Nicholson seems to have 
removed Coverdale's original title-page, which set 
forth that the book was " faithfully and truly trans- 
lated out of Dutch (German) and Latin into Eng- 
lish ^' ; and to have substituted another declaring 

1 Westcott, p. 71. ^ Stoughton, p. 124. 



COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 59 

only that it was " faithfully translated into Eng- 
glish. " He also added a florid dedication to 
the king, and the book was further embellished 
by a map which, as a work of fiction, almost 
equals the dedication. The title-page is exceed- 
ingly elaborate, and seems intended to set forth the 
common origin of both Testaments. The creation 
of man, Moses on Sinai, the public reading of the 
law, John the Baptist preaching in the wilder- 
ness, Jesus sending forth his disciples, Peter ad- 
dressing the multitude on the day of Pentecost, 
are the Bible scenes represented ; while due jus- 
tice is done to the king by a picture showing him 
engaged in giving the book to his lords, spiritual 
and temporal. 

'' Biblia: The Bible, that is the Holy Scriptures 
of the Old and New Testament, ' ' so the title runs. 
The ecclesiastical term comes first, the vernacular, 
so dear to our ears, follows. The Apocrypha is 
included in the translation ; the Epistle to the 
Hebrews is placed between the Third Epistle of 
John and the Epistle of James, which is itself 
followed by Jude and the Revelation. A summary 
of its contents precedes each book. There are no 
headings to the chapters ; the division into verses 
is not indicated, and, following the later example 
of Tvndale, there are no explanatory 

u X ^ J • .1 A. D. 1535. 

notes. A true concordance m the 

margent, ' ' adds much to the value of the book, 



60 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and later editions contained * ' many necessary 
annotacyons after the chapters, declarynge sondry 
harde places conteyned in the texte.'* 

We have spoken of Coverdale as possessed of an 
impressionable nature. His work was evidently 
done at the instigation of others. More and Cran- 
mer were his patrons in England. Meteren em- 
ployed him at Antwerp. He performed his task 
" at the cost and charges of others. " To help him 
in his translations he turned, he says, to Ivatinand 
German interpreters, " whom because of their sin- 
gular gifts and special diligence in the Bible I have 
been the more glad to follow for the most part." ^ 

The influence of Tyndale is very evident in the 
Pentateuch and the New Testament. In* other 
parts he followed the Vulgate, but he was espe- 
cially indebted to I^uther's Bible, three volumes of 
which were printed in 1524, and the remaining ten, 
completing the edition, in 1532.^ 
. It was probably through no fault of his that 
Coverdale lacked the robust independence of Tyn- 
dale, but still he had to take the consequences. 
The royal favor for which he set his sails did not 
come. Nicholson's courtly dedication to the king 
failed of its objects. No license for its circulation 
was granted. Cranmer, for some reason, instead 
of adopting the new translation prepared to have 
another made ; for his convocation in 1534 had 

1 Dore, p. 91. ^ Dore, p. 90. 



COVEEDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 61 

censured all books of suspected doctrine in the 
vulgar tongue printed on the continent, and 
Coverdale no less than Tyndale would be included 
in this condemnation. Neither royal nor ecclesi- 
astical patronage rewarded the man whose natural 
disposition it was to trust in them both. 
Still there was progi'ess. The book was 
not positively suppressed. The leaders in the 
church had become anxious, and themselves peti- 
tioned that a new translation might be ordered by 
the sovereign whose servants they were. Cromwell 
himself presided at a council of bishops and learned 
men, which must have shown the great minister 
what strides the Reformation was making among the 
dignitaries of the church. When Stokesley, bishop 
of I/Ondon, sneered at the word of God which ever>^ 
cobbler was reading in his mother tongue, Crom- 
well and many others gathered around the board 
did not conceal their merriment at ^' his old rusty 
sophistries"; and Fox, bishop of Hereford, made 
bold to say, in a speech which rose to true elo- 
quence : "The lay people do now know the Holy 
Scriptures better than many of us. . . . Truth is 
the daughter of time^ and time is the mother of 
truth ; and whatsoever is besieged of truth cannot 
long continue. ' ' ^ The disgrace and death of Anne 
Boleyn could no more stay the march of the good 
work than can the slain on the battlefield arrest 

1 Westcott, p. 84. 



62 THE HISTORY^ OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

the rising of tlie sun. The first edition of Cover- 
dale's Bible was soon exhausted, and others fol- 
lowed, "set forth with the king's most gracious 
license." For the edition of 1537, Nicholas, bishop 
of Salisbury, prescribed "a prayer to be used by 
one reading the Bible." In the same year another 
composite Bible was ready for publication, made 
up largely from the work of Tyndale and Cover- 
dale. Once more, but happily for the last time, 
we have to trace underground the secret history of 
a Bible the authorship of which is even now un- 
certain. 

A hundred years ago, the name of John Rogers 
was a household word in New England, and the 
rude woodcut of his martyrdom was almost the 
only work of art permitted in a country where art 
was never much favored. Rogers was one of Tyn- 
dale' s friends, and chaplain to an English congre- 
gation in Antwerp.^ A Cambridge man, a good 
■general scholar and especially able as a linguist, 
his intimacy with Tyndale both strengthened his 
love for the reformed faith and quickened in him 
a zeal for Bible translation. It was natural that 
Rogers should be Tyndale' s literary executor. A 
version of the books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles, 
inclusive, came in this way into Rogers' hands. 
Upon this he proceeded to put together a compos- 
ite Bible, made up of Tyndale's translations of the 

1 Stoughton, p. 144. 



COVERDALE, AND THE GEEAT BIBJ.E. 63 

Old Testament as far as it went, with the remainder, 
including the Apocrypha^ from Coverdale ; while 
for the New Testament he used the revised edition 
of Tyndale. Rogers was related by marriage to 
Jacob Van Meteren, and it is quite likely that the 
enterprising printer of Coverdale' s Bible printed 
this one also. Two London citizens, R. Grafton 
and B. Whitchurch, met the expense of the work, 
which was printed and finished ' ' to the honor and 
praise of God in the year of our Lord God 
MDXXXVIL"^ The title-page reads, ''The 
Bible which is all the Holy Scriptures : in whych 
are contayned the Olde and Newe Testaments truly 
and purely translated into English by Thomas 
Matthew." Now who was Thomas Matthew? 
His name occurs at full length at the close of the 
dedication, but an exhortation to the study of the 
Scriptures which follows bears the initials "J. R.'* 
Foxe, the martyrologist, is our authority for believ- 
ing that Rogers and Matthew were one and the 
same person. In the sentence pronounced on 
Rogers before his death he is called ' ' John Rogers, 
alias Matthew," and in the Council Register of 
Mary's Reign it is written, "John Rogers, alias 
Matthew is ordered to keep his house at Paul's." 
The Bible was currently known as Rogers', and if 
Matthew had a separate personality of his own it is 
strange that nothing further is known about him. 

1 Stoughton, p. 138, 



64 THE HLSTOKY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

The dedication to the sovereign and his queen, 
Jane, is effusively loyal, and concludes with a 
prayer in which multitudes of true Bngiish hearts 
would join, that a son and heir might be granted 
to them who might " prosperously and fortunately 
reign and follow the godly steps of his father." 

Both Cranmer and Cromwell were interested in 
the appearance of this Bible. The archbishop 
prays the minister, in a letter dated August 4, 1537, 
to show the book to the king, and to obtain a li- 
cense for its sale, until ' ' we bishops shall set forth 
a better translation, which I think will not be till 
a day after doomsday. ' ' Within a week, Cranmer 
was able to tell him that the book, more pleasant 
to him than the gift of a thousand pounds, had 
been seen by the king, and leave to buy and sell 
it freely granted. This was a triumph of diplom- 
acy, for the notes and comments distributed 
through Matthew's Bible are openly Protestant, 
and the works of Tyndale, to which the compilers 
had been so much indebted, had been more than 
once condemned by the king and his council. 
Grafton, who had advanced so much money for 
the printing of the Bible, suggested that a royal 
command should oblige every curate in the realm 
to purchase one of them, and every abbey six. 
"They of the papistical sort," he thought should 
be compelled to have them. All others, it may 
be presumed, would need no royal mandate. Cer- 



COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 65 

tainly the book was eagerly welcomed. Grafton 
was forced to appeal to Cromwell for protection 
against certain piratical Germans, who were pre- 
paring to republish it for " covetousness " ; and 
but that another and far nobler enterprise was now 
filling the great statesman's mind, no doubt 
Matthew's Bible would have been even better 
known to history than it is. As it was, a I^ondon 
lawyer, Richard Taverner, prepared a Bible of his 
own, which he issued in two editions in 1539, and 
which was undoubtedly based upon that of 
Matthew. It was printed in London by Byddell 
and Bartlett, at the Sign of the Sun, and prefaced 
by a manly dedication to the king. Taverner 
makes no claim to be more than a reviser of pre- 
vious work, and as he was very much of a ped- 
ant — loving to cite the law, in court in Greek, 
vain of his accomplishments, and preaching, lay- 
man although he was, before the young king, Ed- 
ward VI. , in a damask gown, velvet bonnet, and 
gold chain, we may fairly conclude that he does 
not make too modest an estimate of his share in this 
good work. It was this same Richard Taverner 
who provoked Thomas Fuller by holding forth be- 
fore the students in St. Mary's, Oxford, in his 
high sheriff's gold chain and sword, and begin- 
ning his discourse thus : "I have brought you 
some fine biscuits, baked in the oven of charity, 
and carefully conserved for the chickens of the 



66 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

church, the sparrows of the Spirit, and the sweet 
swallows of salvation." Fuller had reason for 
complaining that "preaching now ran very low," 
if this is a fair specimen of the pulpit oratory of 
the period/ The conceit of it is not more mani- 
fest than is its bad taste. 

The time was now ripe for a Bible not only ap- 
proved by the king, but actually issued under his 
authority. It was to this that Cromwell directed 
his energies in 1538. Coverdale was to undertake 
the work. Regnault, of Paris, was to print it 
with a splendor to which the Bnglish presses 
were not equal. In the early autumn, Cromwell 
received the welcome news that within five months 
the Bible would be ready. The inquisitor-gen- 
eral of France, however, appeared on the scene, 
when the text was almost finished, and peremp- 
torily forbade its further progress. Coverdale and 
Grafton, the generous London citizen who was 
with him, escaped to England. They were for- 
tunate enough to carry off presses?, types, work- 
men, and even four great dry vats full of con- 
demned sheets, which had been sold to a trades- 
man as waste paper. Not by any means for the 
first time, the spirit of intolerance did the cause of 
liberty a good turn. England now possessed on 
her own shores men and material equal to carry 
through a worthy edition of the book in the 

^ Stoughton, p. 148. 



COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 67 

mother tongue. By April, 1539, The ^ ^ ^^^^ 
Great Bible^ as it came to be called, 
translated "by divers excellent men," was com- 
pleted. If no royal dedication was prefixed to this 
book, the loss was amply compensated by a mag- 
nificent title-page, which Holbein, the court 
painter, is said to have designed, and in which 
the king figures giving the Bible to Cranmer and 
Cromwell, who distribute it among the ecclesias- 
tics and laymen, while below, a crowd, admirably 
depicted, listens eagerly to a preacher who ad- 
dresses them from a pulpit bearing the inscription : 
Vivat Rex. The Protestant Church of England 
was from the first subservient to the State, and 
Henry was not likely to let this be forgotten. ^ Much 
to Coverdale's regret, no comments were permitted 
to be printed with this great Bible, which owed so 
much to him, although he ofiered to submit them 
first of all to Bishop Bonner for his approval. The 
book, which lives in our literature in the Episco- 
pal Psalter, remains the noblest monument to Crom- 
well's zeal. When he fell from power, in 1540, it 
survived his disgrace. Tuns tall, the very same 
bishop who, although a scholar of repute himself, 
had refused to give the scholar's chamber to Tyn- 
dale, and who had afterward preached against his 
New Testament and ordered its destruction, was 
now forced to swim with the stream, and the third 

^ See Stoughton for Illustration. 



68 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

edition bears on its title-page his name, as over- 
seeing the translation by the king's 
■ command. By a specified day this 
complete English Bible was to be set np in every 
chnrch throughout the kingdom, lyatimer or- 
dered it to be chained in the monastery of Worces- 
ter. Bonner put six copies in St. Paul's, and was 
sore distressed to find that people persisted in 
reading them even during the public services and 
while the preacher was declaring the word of God. 
Crowds would gather about the book, which was 
chained to a pillar, and there would be eager dis- 
cussions as to the meaning of the passages read 
aloud by some scholar who chanced to be present.^ 
This bright hour was destined to be very brief. 
Cromwell's execution removed the principal advo- 
cate for the English Bible from the counsels of the 
king. In 1543, Henry's mind had completely 
changed. Tyndale's translation was prohibited by 
Act of Parliament. Coverdale's ambition to see a 
Bible published with his annotations was dashed to 
the ground by a clause commanding that all Bibles 
thus accompanied should be destroyed. Neither 
in public nor in private were apprentices, artificers, 
journeymen, servants, husbandmen, and laborers 
to be permitted to read the Scriptures. The pub- 
lic reading in the churches by the curates was 
probably continued, but the tide had set in against 

1 Eadie, Vol. I., pp. 400, 401. 



COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 69 

the English Bible, and no one could tell how far 
or how fast it would run. Happily Henry VIII. 
was drawing near his end ; but Cover- 
dale's heart must have sunk when ■' ' ■ 
the sovereign to whom he had been so loyal issued 
another proclamation, in 1546, coupling his own 
version with that of Tyndale in a common con- 
demnation. The bishops who had put their names 
to it, now hastened to disown their signatures. In 
some places Bibles were burned. The last edition 
of the Great Bible printed in Henry's reign ap- 
peared in 1541. A half-hearted proposition for a 
new translation fell to the ground. Coverdale 
himself fled to the continent, and in the town of 
Bergzabern married, was pastor of a church, and 
kept school.^ On the 28th of January, 1547, 
Henry died, and the period of suspense came to 
an end. 

The accession of Edward VI. , brought Cover- 
dale home again. He was made a royal chaplain, 
and his zeal in suppressing a revolt in the west of 
England was rewarded with the bishopric of Exe- 
ter. The work of revision, however, if it did not 
actually slumber during the brief reign of the frail 
young king, was not active. The bishops were 
busy giving a constitution and prayer book to 
the English church. Cranmer, who never lost 
sight of the supreme ambition of his life, appointed 

^ Dore, p. 89. 



70 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

two great scholars, Fagius and Bucer, to professor- 
ships at Cambridge, and laid upon them the task of 
interpreting the Scriptures "according to the pro- 
priety of the language," and of illustrating obscure 
passages and reconciling those which seemed to be 
at variance the one with the other. But Fagius 
and Bucer both fell sick, and this, as the old 
chronicler, Strype, says : ' ' gave a very unhappy 
stop to their studies." That the demand for the 
Scriptures grew is proved by the fact that, al- 
thou2:h Edward reissued only six 

A. D. IS^T-ISSS. . . . 

years and a half, thirteen editions 
of Bibles and thirty-five of Testaments were pub- 
lished in England during his reign. The most 
ambitious attempt at a new version was made by 
Sir John Cheke, at one time professor of Greek at 
Cambridge, and tutor to Edward VI. He com- 
pleted the Gospel of Matthew and began Mark ; 
but then his work ceased. Possibly it was never 
intended for publication. Cheke had a perverse 
ingenuity in coining words, preferring biword^ to 
parable ; gainbirth^ to regeneration ; uprisings to 
resurrection ; freshmen^ to proselytes ; crossed^ to 
crucified.^ 

In 1553, the young king, from whom the Protest- 
ant party had hoped to receive such great benefits, 
passed away. Queen Mary at once prohibited the 
open reading of the Scriptures, and copies which 

1 Westcott, pp. 119, 120. 



AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 71 

had been set up in the churches were burnt, but so 
deep and strong was the popular feeling in favor 
of the Bible in the vernacular, that no vigorous 
effort was made to find and forfeit the copies which 
must have been hidden away in thousands of Eng- 
lish homes. 

Not long after her accession to the throne, 
Mary, accompanied by her husband, Philip of 
Spain, passed in procession through the gayly 
decked streets ot London. Among the emblem- 
atic designs which welcomed them was one repre- 
senting her royal father, Henry VIII. , giving a Bible 
to his young son, Edward. Perhaps it had appeared 
before when Edward visited the city. Times were 
changed now, however, and the artist was sum- 
moned before Bishop Gardiner, branded as "a 
villain and traitor," and bidden paint out the 
book and put a glove in its place. Evidently 
England was no country for Protestants. Cranmer 
and Rogers were burned. The bones of Fagius 
and Bucer were treated in the same way. Coverdale 
was imprisoned, and only escaped martyrdom by 
the special intervention of the king of Denmark. 
John Macbee, a Scotch minister living in Den- 
mark, married to Coverdale' s sister, had the ear 
of the sovereign, and welcomed the exile when 
once again he sought a shelter from persecution in 
his own country. 

The next trace we have of him is in Geneva, 



72 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and it was during this period of forced absence from 
England that Coverdale, together with William 
Whittingham, who was related by marriage to 
Calvin, and other exiles prepared the version of 
the Bible which gained and held the heart of the 
English people for the next half-century. The 
Genevan Testament appeared in 1557, 
and Calvin himself prefaced it with 
an ' ' Introductory Epistle. ' ' In size and price it 
was better fitted than the Great Bible for general 
circulation, and Coverdale must have seen with 
satisfaction the addition of the marginal commen- 
tary, on which his heart had been set in his earlier 
work. No sooner was the Testament published 
than the learned exiles plunged into the more 
serious business of revising the whole Bible. They 
continued at their task " for the space of ten years 
and more, day and night." Before they had con- 
cluded it, Mary died, and Elizabeth ascended the 
English throne. Coverdale seems to have gone 
home, but under the care of Whittingham, with 
one or two more who remained awhile in Geneva, 
the work of revision was thoroup;hly 

A Q 1560 

completed. With a dedication ''to the 
most virtuous and noble Queen Elizabeth, whom 
God hath made our Zerubbabel for the erecting of 
this most excellent Temple," the Genevan Bible 
made its appearance in 1560. In form it was a 
moderate quarto ; for the first time the text was 



COVERDALE, AND THE GREAT BIBLE. 73 

printed in Roman letter, and the chapters were 
divided into verses. For the first time also the 
Apocrypha was omitted. The monopoly of print- 
ing it was granted by Elizabeth to John Bodley, 
whose name lives still in the famous library at 
Oxford. Eighty editions appeared before the 
x\uthorized Version came to dispute with it the 
place of honor in the affections of the country. 

It was on August 24, 1559, that a bishop from 
England/ no doubt Coverdale, requested a dis- 
missal from the city council of Geneva, so that he 
might return to England. He never resumed his 
bishopric, but was given the living of St. Magnus' 
Church, near I^ondon Bridge. " Surely," said the 
bishop of Ivondon, in pleading that higher honors 
should be paid to him, "it is not well that he, qui 
ante nos omnes fuit in Christo should be now, in 
his age, without stay of living." He was very 
poor. During his exile he had been described as 
"a poor pilgrim," and now he was unable to pay 
the queen the firstfruits of his benefice. Being 
"not like to live a year," he pathetically appeals 
to his sovereign for her bounty. In 1566, he re- 
signed his living, and soon after, at the 
advanced age of eighty-one, he died. 

Compared with Wycliffe and Tyndale, Miles 
Coverdale may seem to lack in force of character 
and in independence. A courtier with Cromwell, 

^ Stoughton, p. 201. 



74 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

he became a Puritan with Calvin. He trusted — as 
his predecessors in the work of translation did not 
— to royal patronage, to the favor of statesmen, and 
to the inspiration of his ecclesiastical superiors. No 
doubt he aimed at obtaining for his work the 
king's most gracious license. No doubt he 
caught quickly the impress of the hour. But, 
we must remember that he made no pro- 
fession of originality, and contented himself by 
assuring the reader that if he was fervent in prayer 
God would discover to him the nobler services of 
Tyndale, and also move others to attach them- 
selves to the good work in which he was content 
to be an obscure laborer.^ 

His life was everywhere simple and beautiful. 
When he had means at his disposal, he was profuse 
in his hospitality. In his fair old age he loved to 
preach, and people loved to listen to him. They 
"ran after Father Coverdale," we are told, and 
would call at his house to ask where he would 
preach the next Lord's Day. To him alone be- 
longs the distinction of giving a whole Bible to 
the English nation. In his faith in the gospel he 
wavered as little as he did in his faith in the Script- 
ures , and when he died the English Reformation 
was already an accomplished fact, and the English 
Bible was secured forever to the English people. 

1 Westcott, p. 75. 



V. 
THE BISHOPS^ BIBLE. 



I utterly dissent from those who are unvviUing that the 
Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned, trans- 
lated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had 
taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be under- 
stood even by a few theologians, or as though the 
strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's 
ignorance of it. — Erasmus. 



CHAPTER V. 

QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 

TyndalE, the young student, aspired to see the 
Bible in the hands of English ploughboys. Tyn- 
dale the martyr did not die before the ambition to 
which he had surrendered his whole life was grati- 
fied. He perished at the stake a year after Cover- 
dale's Bible appeared. In his turn, Coverdale was 
possessed of a purpose which to his mind seemed 
not less worthy than Tyndale's. His desire was 
to have an English Bible sent forth with the 
authority of "The king's most gracious licence," 
and under the auspices of the leaders of the Estab- 
lished Church. The year before he died this desire 
also was gratified. The Bishops' Bible 
was published in 1568. Its title de- 
clared that it was authorized by the ecclesiastical 
authorities, and the printer loudly claimed for it 
the sanction of the sovereign. 

By this time Elizabeth had been queen of Eng- 
land ten years, and the people had no excuse for 
ignorance as to the policy which she proposed to 
pursue. More than any other of her house, she had 
the qualities which made that house so great. She 
united the cautious shrewdness of Henry VII. , her 

77 



78 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

grandfather, and the lavish splendor of her father, 
Henry VIII. As well as either of them she knew 
how to keep the word of promise to the ear and 
break it to the hope. 

A Protestant at heart she certainly was not, but 
she was as firmly resolved as was her royal father 
before her, to have no foreign prince, secular or 
sacred, lording it over England. She was supreme 
in her own realm, and there can be no question 
that the passionate devotion with which she in- 
spired the bravest and noblest of her courtiers, fairly 
expressed the loyalty of the people at large. 

The concessions which she made to the Protest- 
ant party at the commencement of her reign only 
restored to that party the liberties granted by 
Edward VI. In every parish church a copy "of 
the whole Bible of the largest volume," was to be 
set up once more ; and ' ' with great humility and 
reverence, as the very lively word of God," all were 
to read the same. 

As she rode in royal state through I^ondon, 
Father Time appeared in the pageant leading his 
white -robed daughter, Truth. In her hand she 
carried the English Bible, which she presented to 
Elizabeth, who laid it upon her breast, heartily 
thanking the city for their present and promising 
often to read it. The assurance was all the more 
welcome because her people were in no little doubt 
as to the ardor of her Protestant convictions. In 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 79 

his collection of apothegms, lyord Bacon writes : 
' ' On the morrow of her coronation, it being the 
custom to release prisoners at the inauguration of 
a prince, . . . one of her courtiers . . . besought 
her with a loud voice, ' That now this good time 
there might be four or five principal prisoners 
more released ; these were the four evangelists and 
the Apostle St. Paul, who had been long shut up 
in an unknown tongue, as it were in prison, so as 
they could not converse with the common people. ' 
The Queen answered very gravely, ' That it was 
best first to inquire whether they 

, , , 1 J )))l D A. D. 1559-1575. 

would be released or no.' "^ Par- 
ker, the archbishop of Canterbury, who with no 
little of Cranmer's tact inherited much of Cran- 
mer's zeal for revision, would lose no opportunity 
for assuring her majesty on this point. The need 
was urgent for a version of the Bible at once 
authoritative and popular. Ecclesiastical patron- 
age and protection had failed to make for the Great 
Bible any permanent place in England. It re- 
mained chained in the church, but the Genevan 
Version was at home at the fireside. In a letter to 
Secretary Cecil, written in 1565,^ Parker of Canter- 
bury, and Edmund Grindal, bishop of I^ondon, 

1 Bacon's "Apothegms," p. 4. 

2 Cecil was himself invited to take part in the translation, " that ye 
may be one of the builders of this good work in Christ's church." 
— Dore, p. 237. 



«0 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

mark out the policy which they proposed to pursue 
in dealing with the popular Bible, by promising 
that if Bodley's patent for printing it might be ex- 
tended twelve years longer, they would see to it 
' ' that no impression should pass but by their di- 
rection, consent, and advice/' So well did they 
keep their promise that it was not until the arch- 
bishop's death that the version was published in 
England itself. Nothing, however, could check 
the popularity of the Genevan Bible with the 
people. For three-quarters of a century it held its 
place as the household Bible of the English speak- 
ing nations.^ 

It could scarcely be expected that a good 
Anglican would feel ver}^ kindly toward the Gene- 
van Bible. In its marginal annotations no meas- 
ured terms were used when the opportunity 
occurred for launching a missile against prelacy. 
By the word "bishop" the apostle was said to 
mean only pastors, doctors, and elders ; *' deacons " 
were simply almoners of the bounty of the church 
to the poor and sick. When Paul spoke of ' ' beg- 
garly elements," he had in his mind ceremonies in 
worship, in which Easter and Whitsuntide might 
be included. In common with so many commen- 
tators, strongly influenced by their times, the 
Genevan divines reveled in the Apocalypse, and 
saw in the locusts ''worldly prelates . . . with 

1 Westcott, 126. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 81 

archbishops, bishops, etc.," and in the crown 
which the locusts wore, the proud titles in which 
the priests boasted themselves, but "which in 
deede belongeth nothing unto them. ' ' ^ 

Apart from these personal considerations which 
placed the bishops on the horns of a dilemma be- 
tween a version which the people loved but which 
they themselves could not approve, and a version 
which they sanctioned but which the people would 
not use, it is easy to see that uniformity was per- 
emptorily demanded in the interests of truth. In 
this church the Great Bible was used, in that the 
Genevan. The minds of the people would be dis- 
tracted and torn over the rival claims of Lambeth 
and Geneva. On the very field where all parties 
should be united, the fiercest battle would be 
fought. Very early in Elizabeth's reign, a bill 
was enacted ' ' for reducing of diversities of Bibles 
now extant in the English tongue to one settled 
vulgar, translated from the original."^ 

To the long and honorable line of men devoted 
to the publication of the English Bible we now 
add another name. The task of planning the new 
version could scarcely have fallen into hands bet- 
ter fitted to carry it through with credit than those 
of Archbishop Parker. Of full and ripe scholar- 
ship, happily constituted to bear the numberless 
petty annoyances to which such a leader would be 

1 Edgar, p. 192 2 Stoughton, p. 208. 



82 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

exposed, impartial enougli to admire the Genevan 
Bible while conscious of its ecclesiastical bias, with 
a certain adroit good humor coupled with genuine 
kindliness of heart, Parker was far too genuine a 
man to merit the caricature which Butler draws 
of him in " Hudibras." But he is lampooned by 
the satirist in honorable company. Thexreature 
of the vices of the court in London and of the viru- 
lence of the Vatican at Rome may be excused for 
failing to recognize the conspicuous virtue of either 
Anglican or Puritan. Four years (1564-68) were 
devoted to the preparation of the Bishops' Bible. 
^' The archbishop ' sorted out the whole Bible into 
parcels,' and distributed these for examination and 
revision among qualified divines. ' ' ^ His own bib- 
lical studies fitted him to be himself the final arbi- 
trator on all points of dispute raised by his staff. 
The copy of instructions which he sent to each 
reviser advises that the new version should be 
based on the Great Bible, while the work of other 
translators was to be respected, and tio alterations 
made save for sufficient reason. The revisers were 
to ' ' make no bitter notes upon any text nor yet 
set down any determination in places of contro- 
versy." Words which usage or fashion had now 
decided to be light or indelicate were to be changed 
for ' ' more convenient terms or phrases. ' ' 

Although initials are placed at the end of some 

' Edgar, p. 195. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 83 

of the books, a complete list of the contributors is 
nowhere given. Of the revisers who can be prob- 
ably identified, eight were bishops, and from them 
the revision derived its popular title/ 

The archibishop's suavity must have been se- 
verely taxed during his four years of superinten- 
dence. Some of the revisers seem themselves to 
have stood in need of revision. Cox, bishop of 
Ely, writing to Parker on the subject of the 
"Psalms," suggested that "the translation of the 
verbs be used uniformly, in one tense," and we 
can forgive the unconscious humor of the historian 
who remarks : ' ' The archibishop accordingly gave 
to this prelate Acts and Romans. " ^ Evidently he 
might better be trusted with Greek than with 
Hebrew. Guest, bishop of Rochester, had no hes- 
itation in turning ' ' the praeter-perfect tense into 
the present tense, because the sense is too harsh in 
the praeter-perfect tense," and he is so determined 
that the quotations from the Old Testament, which 
are found in the New, shall be correctly made that 
he adopts the following principle : ' ' When in the 
New Testament one piece of a psalm is reported I 
translate it in the Psalms according to the trans- 
lation thereof in the New Testament, for the avoid- 
ing of the offense that may rise to the people upon 
divers translations." Whatever may be said of the 
morality of this canon there can be no question 

I Westcott, p. 135. ^ Edgar, p. 199. 



84 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE 

that it is extremely simple, and were it universally 
adopted a vast amount of controversy would no 
doubt be avoided. 

Certainly Bishop Cox, although not to be trusted 
with Hebrew verbs, hit the mark when he wrote 
to Parker : " I perceive the greatest burden will lie 
upon your neck touching care and travail. ' ' The 
result was just what might have been anticipated. 
The Old Testament was inferior in its execution 
to the New ; both were unequal in merit, and as 
Professor Moulton says : " The verdict of the stu- 
dent will vary according to the portion which he 
is examining." The Great Bible is followed most 
closely in the historical books of the Old Testa- 
ment, and throughout that version is preferred to 
the Genevan, sometimes with advantage, but more 
frequently without. The influence of Tyndale is 
stronglv felt, and notwithstanding Parker's rec- 
ommendation there are numerous instances in 
which inelegant words and phrases remain. The 
variations from previous versions are' more numer- 
ous in the New Testament than in the Old, and 
Bishop Westcott, on a critical analysis of one pas- 
sage (Eph. 4 : 7-16), decides that "the character 
of the original correction marks very close and 
thoughtful revision, based faithfully upon the 
Greek." 

The notes in the Bishops' Bible, while avoiding 
the controversial bitterness which the good arch- 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 85 

bishop deprecated, are such as might as a rule 
have emanated from Geneva, and their sturdy Pro- 
testantism is often worthy of Luther himself. The 
printer and engraver did their utmost to produce a 
volume deserving of the place which the new Bible 
was intended to fill. It was issued in magnificent 
style, profusely ornamented with wood engravings; 
embellished in questionable taste with copper-plate 
portraits of the queen, Leicester, and Burleigh ; 
furnished with a map of Palestine ; and supple- 
mented by an elaborate series of genealogical 
tables. 

Besides translating ' ' Genesis, " " Exodus, ' ' the 
first two Gospels, and most of the Epistles of Paul, 
and, adding as Strype says, "the last hand," and 
caring for the printing and publishing of the whole, 
Archbishop Parker wrote on behalf of the revisers 
two prefaces, one for the Old and the other for the 
New Testament. In these he exults on account 
of the rich legacy which " not in promise but in 
open sight," the believer inherits. There may in- 
deed, he confesses, be dark places yet, but the gifts 
and graces of the Holy Spirit flow as continually 
and abundantly as from the beginning, and ' ' who 
can doubt but that such things as remain yet un- 
known in the gospel shall be hereafter made open 
to the later wits of our posterity, to their clear 
understanding." ^ 

' Westcott, p. 134. 



86 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE, 

A patent was granted to Rictiard Jngge to pub- 
lish the Bishops' Bible cum priviligio Regies maj- 
estatis. This was partially renewed to his son John ; 
but in 1579, Christopher Barker, by paying a great 
sum^ purchased the exclusive right to issue Bibles 
and Testaments in the English tongue, and al- 
though with varying fortune, this monopoly was 
retained by the Barkers until the year 1709/ 

Parker and Cecil united to urge the merits of 
the new version on the attention of Queen Bliza- 
beth, but she does not seem to have granted her 
royal sanction to it, although Convocation which 
would scarcely have run counter to her pleasure, 
approved it heartily. Every archbishop and bishop 
was ordered to have a large paper copy in his 
house, and to place it in the hall or dining room 
for the special use of servants and strangers. No 
cathedral must be without it, and as far as con- 
venient, churches should be furnished with it also. 

Yet the Bishops' Bible was never popular. It 
did indeed succeed in supplanting the Great Bible 
in the churches, but the Genevan Bible was still 
the people's choice. Thirteen editions of Parker's 
Version appeared in folio, one in octavo, six in 
quarto. The small-sized edition, printed in 1584, 
was sufficient to meet the demands for it which 
came from the hearthstones of England ; but six- 
teen such editions of the Genevan Version were 

1 Eadie, Vol. II., chapter 48. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 87 

published between 1611 and 1688, while fifty-two in 
quarto and eighteen in folio, confirm us in the belief 
that even the halls and churches in many instances 
preferred the Bible of the exiles to the Bible of the 
ecclesiastics. Although "set forth by authority," 
the authority was only that of Convocation, and 
even those who should have been obedient to their 
spiritual superiors seem to have faltered in their 
loyalty. Nine years after its publication the arch- 
bishop complains that the churches are not suffi- 
ciently furnished with Bibles, while many have to 
put up with copies torn, defaced, and "not of the 
translation authorized by the synod of bishops." ^ 
No doubt there was still a Romish, as well as a 
Puritan sentiment strong in England, and the 
Bishops' Bible satisfied neither the one nor the 
other. The original views as to translation 
held by some of the revisers did not impart 
distinction to its pages. It was voted timid, 
and therefore colorless. Although Bishop Cox 
argued against "ink-horn terms," the English of 
the people was often sacrificed for stale, stilted 
phraseology. The music of David fares badly in 
such a rendering as, God is my shephearde^ there- 
fore I can lack nothyng : he will cause me to 
repose myself in pastures full of grasse^ and he 
will leade me into calme waters ; and the pithiness 
of the original evaporates in the translation of Pro- 

1 Edgar, p. 196. 



88 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

verbs 25 : 27, Curiously to search the glory of 
heavenly things is not commendable ; while the 
fantastic spirit which delights in quips drove Paul 
from the field in the words, / thought it necessary 
to exhort the brethren that they should come before 
unto you^ and prepare your fore-promised benefi- 
cence^ that it might be ready as a beneficence^ and 
not as an extortion} 

That the Bishops' Bible failed to gain the hearts 
of the people, or even the adherence of the clergy, 
and repels the respect of scholars, is little to be 
wondered at. The close of Elizabeth's reign saw 
rival versions still in possession. In addition to 
the Genevan Version, with its obnoxious controver- 
sial comment, there was the Rheinis New Testa- 
ment, which reached England in 1582, carefully 
guarding itself against the supposition that it was 
intended for ' ' ale-benches, boats, and barges, ' ' and 
aiming to keep close to the ' ' authentic text of the 
Vulgate. ' ' It was the response given by the English 
Roman Catholic refugees in Rheims to a challenge 
to suspend criticisms of existing translations and 
produce a better themselves. The evening before 
her execution in Fotheringay Castle, Mary, Queen 
of Scots, swore her innocence upon this book, and 
when the Earl of Kent objected that the book it- 
self was false, she answered, quickly : ' ' Does your 
lordship believe that my oath would be better if I 

1 Edgar, p. 225. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE BISHOPS'* BIBLE. 89 

swore on your translation, in which. I do not be- 
lieve ? " ^ The Old Testament, under the same aus- 
pices, was published at Douay, in 1609, having 
been delayed, as the editors say, thirty years, 
' ' owing to their poor estate in banishment. ' ' 

In addition to the Rheims New Testament, a 
translation from Beza's lyatin version of the book 
had been made by lyawrence Tomson, an under- 
secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham ; and a learned 
Hebraist, Hugh Broughton, dissatisfied with the 
Bishops' Bible, and failing in securing the partner- 
ship of " six of the longest students in the tongues, ' ' 
in a scheme for producing a better, tried his own 
hand at the books of David, Bcclesiastes, I^amen- 
tations, and Job. Although his overbearing 
temper made him an impracticable coadjutor, yet 
upon the royal version, when that came to be exe- 
cuted, his independent labors had a perceptible in- 
fluence. 

Thus matters stood when Elizabeth died. The 
history of the English Bible from the dawning with 
WyclilBfe to the final labors of Archbishop Parker, 
covers a period of almost two hundred years. We 
have now followed the changing fortunes of the 
book thus far. The days have forever passed in 
which it can be banned and banished, and those 
who read it tortured and burned. The fiercest op- 
ponents to its free circulation have* themselves sent 

* Eadie, Vol. 2, p. 136. 



90 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

forth English New Testaments from their own 
place of exile. The leaders of the Established 
Church are now united in their resolve to have one 
version uniformly employed. Twice the primate 
of England has thrown himself into an enterprise 
to which scholarship, authority, and even royal 
favor have lent their weight and influence. And 
yet the enterprise, in each instance, has failed. 
The people have persisted in making their own 
choice, and it has been a choice adverse to the 
bishops. But now at last, the hour has come 
when a version of the English Bible can be pre- 
pared in obedience to the command of the crown, 
and by the hands of the ecclesiastical leaders of 
the State, which shall win its way to the hearts 
and homes of the people at large. 



VI. 
THE AUTHORIZED VERSION, 



'' Therefore, blessed be they, and most honored be their 
name that break the ice, and give the onset upon that 
which helpeth forward to the saving of souls. Now what 
can be more available thereto than to deliver God's book 
unto God's people in a tongue which they can under- 
stand? " — Preface to King James* Bible. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THK AUTHORIZED VERSION. 

In the year 1603, James I. came riding up 
to London to be crowned king of England. His 
progress from Scotland, with its pageants in the 
towns and villages through which he passed, 
and the opportunity to enjoy hunting in the parks 
and forests of the nobles, must have been a wel- 
come change from the narrow life to which he had 
been accustomed. At Wilton, however, he found 
time in his intervals from sport to consider the com- 
plaints of the Puritans, who appealed to him to 
deliver them and the national church from the 
tyranny of their rivals, the Ritualists. With the 
exception of hunting, there was nothing which 
James enjoyed more than a theological controversy. 
It pleased him to think himself supeiior to the 
divines in their own domain. The prospect of a 
religious discussion between the two contending 
parties, in which he should play the part of umpire, 
caught his pedantic fancy. He so far listened to 
the petition of the Puritans, as to appoint a confer- 
ence at Hampton Court, at which their 
grievances should be considered. The 
date fixed was the January following ; but proba- 



94 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

bly before that time had come the Puritans knew 
that they had little to hope for from the prince, 
who, if he was born in the country of Knox, was 
himself the son of Knox's bitterest enemy. James 
gave the conference plainly to understand that his 
sympathies were with the High Church party, and 
that he was resolved to suppress all differences of 
opinion and to maintain " one doctrine, one disci- 
pline, and one religion in substance and cere- 
mony. ' ' 

Yet, looking at the event from this distance, we 
can see how the Puritans came off from an appar- 
ently bootless mission with great spoil. Their repre- 
sentative. Dr. Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi 
College, Oxford, raised the question of a revision of 
the Scriptures. A new translation of the Bible was 
needed, he said, because '' those which were allowed 
in the reigns of King Henry VIII. and Edward 
VI. were corrupt and not answerable to the 
truth." This statement he supported by various 
quotations from the Great Bible and the Bishops' 
Bible. What, for example, could be made of the 
words : ^ ' Mount Sinai is Agar in Arabia, and bor- 
dereth upon the city which is now called Jeru- 
salem " ? Paul never said that. It was a travesty 
of his teaching in Gal. 4 : 25. And why were-they 
forced to read in church " They were not obe- 
dient " (Ps. 105 : 28), when the Psalter said the 
very reverse ? And why was Ps. 106 : 30 trans- 



THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. 95 

la ted ' ' Then stood up Phinehas and prayed, " wlien 
the original ran, ^^ and executed judgment ' ' ? Rey- 
nolds' objections to the versions then in use were 
bluntly met by Bancroft, bishop of London, who 
broke in : "If every man's humour is to be fol- 
lowed, there will be no end of translations." No 
doubt much to the bishop's chagrin, the king 
sided with the Puritans in this one instance, 
although he contrived to insult their prejudices 
even while he fell in with their proposal : "I have 
never yet," said he, "seen a Bible well translated 
into English, and the worst of all the translations I 
have seen is the Geneva."^ He favored one uni- 
form translation. Let the universities prepare it, 
the church dignitaries revise it, the Privy Council 
approve it, and then he would himself give to it 
his royal authority, so the whole church should 
be bound to it and to none other. " But," he 
added, "let there be no marginal notes." An 
English lady had given him a copy of the Geneva 
Bible, and the notes he found full of lurking treason 
against the powers that be. 

This happened, as we have said, in January, 
1604. Convocation met in March, but nothing 
was done. The church leaders, as is not unusual 
with them, were inclined to a policy of mas- 
terly inaction. Not so the king. Bancroft soon 
discovered that James was in earnest. By mid- 

1 Edgar, p. 288. 



96 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

summer the scholars who were to be responsible 
for the task were chosen — how this was done 
does not appear — and the list was approved by the 
sovereign. Peace was about this time concluded 
with Spain, and Bancroft wrote to Cambridge that 
he was persuaded the king was happier in the 
prospect of a new translation of the Bible than 
even in the assurance that his most formidable 
opponent among the courts of Europe was recon- 
ciled to him. 

The peace with Spain was celebrated on a 
Sunday, given up to rejoicing. There was a 
grand banquet and ball, and the king, with the 
Spanish ambassador, witnessed the baiting of 
bears and bulls. The other project was not so 
readily disposed of ; but James was able by the 
end of July to write to Bancroft — now acting as 
archbishop of the vacant see of Canterbury — that 
he had "appointed certain learned men to the 
number of four and fifty to do the work." Be- 
sides these, the bishop was to consult the schol- 
arly clergy in their dioceses, that so " our intended 
translation may have the help and furtherance of 
all our principal learned men within this our 
kingdom." 

It is amusing to see how James managed the 
matter of remunerating the translators. He re- 
quested patrons of church preferments not to fill 
up vacancies until his pleasure had been con- 



THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. - 97 

suited, and in this way " seven of the forty-seven 
translators were raised to Episcopal dignity, and 
more than twice seven were settled in other com- 
fortable livings."^ Their immediate expenses the 
king '' was very ready of his most princely dis- 
position to have borne, but some of my lords, as 
things now go, did hold it inconvenient." Con- 
sequently, the bishops and chapters were requested 
to contribute toward this work. For himself, he 
would be the patron of ' ' this our intended trans- 
lation, ' ' and would take pains to be " acquainted 
with every man's liberality." This arrangement 
is highly characteristic of James. He did none 
of the work, paid nothing toward its cost, and 
took to himself all the credit of it. As a fact, the 
bishops seemed to have followed the king's ex- 
ample rather than his precept. Nothing was 
subscribed, and all that the translators received 
was free entertainment when they met. 

Although the king's letter announces that fifty- 
four revisers had been selected, it was probably 
owing to delay and unavoidable inability to serve 
that in the final list only forty-seven names ap- 
peared. Death may have arrested some in their 
purpose ; for although the preliminaries were set- 
tled before the end of 1604, two whole years 
passed before the work was formally begun. 

By 1607, however, the enterprise was fairly 

1 Westcott, p. 145. 
G 



98 



THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 



launched. The forty-seven scholars were divided 
into six parties, and they met at Westminster, at 
Cambridge, and at Oxford, according to the plan 
indicated below. ^ The names of these men as we 
read them now are most of them names only ; but 
a few of them live in our history as scholars, preach- 
ers, and theologians. All of them merit perpetual 
honor for carrying through the great achievement 
of the seventeenth century. Most distinguished 
of them all was Launcelot Andrewes, dean of 
Westminster, afterward bishop of Chichester, 
whose name stands at the head of the first list, a 
man of rich scholarship, master of fifteen lan- 
guages, with a brilliant reputation as a preacher, 
and worthy of the praise of Milton, who dedicated 
to his memory one of his early elegies. 



PLACE. 



1. Westminster 

2. Cambridge ,, 

3. Oxford , 

4. Cambridge .. 

5. Oxford 

6. Westminster 



NUMBER OF REVISERS. 



/. Old Testament. 
10 

8 
7 

//. The Apocrypha. 
7 

III. New Testament. 
8 



BOOKS. 



Genesis to 2 Kings, incl. 
I Chron. to Eccles., incl. 
Isaiah to Malachi. 



The four Gospels, Acts, 

Apocalypse. 
Romans to Jude, incl. 



THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. 99 

How well he understood his royal master is seen 
in the story which the poet Waller tells about him. 
The king one day sitting at dinner with Andrewes 
and his brother bishop, Neale of Durham, inquired: 
'^My lords, cannot I take my subjects' money when 
I want it, without all this formality in Parliament?" 
Neale answered the question j&rst : ' ' God forbid, 
sir, but you should ; you are the breath of our 
nostrils. ' ' James turned to Andrewes, ' ' Well, my 
lord, what say you ? ' ' But Andrewes excused him- 
self from replying. " He had, ' ' he said, " no skill to 
judge of parliamentary cases. " James would take 
no denial. *' No put-off, my lord ; answer me pres- 
ently." "Then, sir," said he, "I think it law- 
ful for you to take my brother Neale' s money, for 
he offers it." 

Reynolds, to whom we have already alluded as 
the leader of the Puritan party in the church, was 
one of the Old Testament committee at Oxford. 
It was at his house that they met to complete their 
portion, and he had the chief hand in this final 
revision, although ' ' sorely afflicted with the gout. ' ' 
His prodigious learning, in the extravagant lan- 
guage of his contemporaries, placed him above all 
writers — profane, ecclesiastical, and divine ; and 
also above all the councils of the church. He 
was more diligent than even Origen; and of him, as 
of Athanasius, it might be said that " to name Rey- 
nolds is to commend virtue itself. ' ' 



100 THE HISTORY OF THE E2iGLI8H BIBLE. 

Reynolds died before the completion of the 
work, and so did lyively, a very accomplished 
scholar, "our Hebrew reader in Cambridge," on 
whom the king had especially relied for assistance. 
Although the formal work of the translators did not 
begin before 1607, yet the fact of I^ively's death 
in 1605, after something had been done, lends color 
to the belief that the more enthusiastic scholars 
started work much earlier. Fuller, the church 
historian, says as much, and adds that the rest 
* ' vigorously, though slowly proceeded in this hard, 
heavy, and holy task ; nothing offended with the 
censures of impatient people condemning their de- 
lays — though indeed but due deliberation — for 
laziness. ' ' ^ 

Certainly Bois, of Cambridge, could not have 
exposed himself to the charge of indolence, for he 
only subtracted time to return to his parish every 
Saturday night, and by Monday morning was 
at his task again ; when he had finished his own 
portion he undertook that of another scholar to 
whom it had been assigned, and after four years of 
incessant labor he formed one of the band of six 
who finally revised the whole at Stationers' Hall, 
lyondon. In three-quarters of a year their crowning 
work was completed, and Bois could return to 
his parish again. The Stationers' Company, prob- 
ably interested in the profits of the printing, paid 

* Stoughton, pp. 247, 248. 



THE AUTHORIZED VEESION. 101 

him and his five companions thirty shillings a week 
for the last revision, and this pitiful sum seems to 
have been all that they received in return for 
nearly five years' hard work. 

Returning to the lists once more, we notice 
the singular richness of the universities in He- 
braists. Six professors of Hebrew were engaged 
in revision, besides Bedwell, the most distin- 
guished Arabic scholar of the time, and Bois, 
who was especially famous for Oriental learn- 
ing.^ "No doubt can be entertained," says 
Westcott, " as to the ability and acquirements of 
the revisers." If Cecil refused to take a layman's 
share in the Bishops' Bible, the Authorized Version 
had the advantage of the assistance of the accom- 
plished provost of Eton, Sir Henry Savile, while 
the name of a Frenchman, D. A. de Sararia, an 
expert modern linguist, preserves the fame of the 
only foreigner engaged in the work. Dr. John 
Layfield was especially skilled in architecture ; Dr. 
Thomas Holland was mighty in the -Scriptures ; 
Kilbye ^ ' had Hebrew at his fingers' ends ' ' ; and 
Miles Smith was to compose the fulsome dedica- 
tion to the king and be rewarded with the bishop- 
ric of Gloucester for this elaborate specimen of 
courtly imagination. Selden, in his ' ' Table- 
Talk, ' ' sketches the various bands at their work, 
in Westminster and the two universities. We 

1 Westcott, pp. 149, 150. 



102 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

can see them as we read his graphic words: ' ' That 
part of the Bible was given to him who was most 
excellent in such a tongue ; and then they met 
together, and one read the translation, the rest 
holding in their hands some Bible, either of the 
learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian, etc. 
If they found any fault they spoke, and if not, he 
read on. ' ' When a portion had been thus gone 
over it was sent to the rest for their approval, and 
either passed or referred to the committee on final 
revision, through whose hands every chapter and 
verse went before the printers received it. 

The instructions which Bancroft, by the king's 
orders, sent to each one of the revisers, are well 
worthy of study. They afford the amplest proof of 
the thoroughness with which the work was plan- 
ned. The Bishops' Bible was to be followed with 
as little alteration as the truth of the original 
would permit : proper names were to be retained 
' ' as nigh as may be accordingly as they were vul- 
garly used ' ' ; old ecclesiastical terms were to be 
kept — churchy for instance, was not to be translated 
congregation; where one word had different signifi- 
cations that one was to be kept which had the 
authority of the Fathers, so long as it was agreeable 
to the propriety of the place and the analogy of 
faith ; the divisions of the chapters were to be 
left as far as possible as they were ; except to ex- 
plain the Hebrew or Greek, no marginal notes 



Clie.iJtolo0gp« 




Ibattt Iirrr trdttOattU 

Chxttlfttn mtb fii(ter*niwfl ^er<att^ 
ten^erb bcPotieb m€i>:tfl ) t^e nc^ 

^^ft)tn^e/con(ol4don/aitt> folas: 
l^|:jcj)02t)>ii£je inHmtiyanb bcftd^j^n^e 
tbo{n\)At an hnter (mt m tbetongf 
ti)en j> / ant> thct ^re j^j^ec |^5^f^f of 
0r«cetomtcrpm tl)e fence oftfjefcr^ 
ipturc /an^rtieanj>n0f oftfjc fp)?:t=: 
te/t{)en j^/toccnfj^bic anbponbte mf 
(aboure / artb t^at witb tpe fpyiite 
of rmFmes. 2(nb j)f tj^^r V^tctyvtin eny\>[ac€et^(ity bAt>f 
not 4rftayneb t^e rerj? fence of tlje teniae / oz mcanyn^t of 
dje fcripture / oi l)4u^ not tgjetjen tt)e tt^ljt eni^ljjff^c t»02t>c / 
tbattjjcj' put to ttjere ^ftnbf to amcnbe tt/remembtjmige tbat jb 
tfiFtberebuetieto bo^* ^02tcc \)avtnHv6ceyv('bt^t ^yibf of QQt 
fci ourefefues only/0afo2to by't>et\)tm: btttfotto bzftovott\)em 
t>ttto tbe bonourmge of cjob^anb d)2ifi/mt> etyfpins^t of dj^econ^; 
0rec(aciort /tod)id^ i^ rf^e bo^;> ofci):tft» 

eZ\)€ caufes^ t\)At mo»e^ metotranflotc /y t[)ou0t better 
t{)atotj»erfbult>eym40ton/tbentb<xtff()ulbere^earcetl)em. 
0itoit otper )> f»ppo(eb yt fuperfluo ug /foi t»S)6 1>« fo bf)>nbe to 
WtD{))>ly0bf fljulbebef (jetoeb to t^em tb^t wdfe m bercP^ 
nes / tJj j)ere tbey cannot but flomble/anb wljereto (lombfe y» 
tbe baunjger of etetnafiPbammacton / otbetfo^efp5JK|>t(iiff* 
t^rttbetJ?olbeen»ycm)?mart cy fpcaFenott bis bjotber) fo 
neceffar)? a tbmjfe/ orfobetlem rtt<tbbe toajfyjwe ti}(tt cfo?t> 
10 tbe noturaff caafeofrneff/Attbberfnes co ptrocebc oute of 
^y^ift I <3^nb t\)iki \ywj$t f^ulbe be0ro«nbet» in ^*ougtj? antj 
t?er)?tie /anb nott ratber cfene contrftrj?/ tljat IjJj^^t be(h*o ^ 
)>etbbercFn>0/anb rerittcrcprovetj; flBPmannerrrm^e. 

The Prologue to Tyndale's New Testament. 
Page 103. 



THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. 103 

were to be affixed ; such quotations of places as 
served for the fit reference of one Scripture to 
another were to be put in the margin ; each man 
was first of all to do his work by himself ; then 
all of the company were to meet and compare re- 
sults ; and finally each company was to send the 
book complete to the rest to be considered seri- 
ously and judiciously. On this point ' ' his majesty 
is very careful." Then followed the provision al- 
ready mentioned for a final revision of the whole. 
Proceeding, the instructions provide that obscure 
passages should be submitted to learned men out- 
side the companies of the revisers, such men 
being sought out by the bishops. The deans of 
Westminster and Chester were to direct the com- 
pany at Westminster, the professors of Hebrew 
and Greek occupying the post in the universities. 
The translations of Tyndale, Matthew, Coverdale, 
Whitchurch (substantially the same as the Great 
Bible), and the Genevan versions were to be used 
where they were found to be truer to the original 
than the Bishops' Bible. Finally, to meet a diffi- 
culty as suggested by the rule as to translating 
words of different significance, three or four of the 
most ancient and grave divines in the universities 
were to oversee the work in conference with the 
directors of the companies, so that full and fair 
justice might be done to the fathers and to the 
analogy of faith. 



104 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Dr. Miles Smith has atoned for his dedication to 
James, with its offensive adulation of that most 
high and mighty Prince, by an "Address to the 
Reader," which remains to us still as one of the 
noblest compositions of the age when our English 
tongue was at its best. The printers, doing the 
thing which they ought not to do, and leaving un- 
done the thing that they should do, have removed 
this preface from our modern editions of the Bible, 
although until quite lately they have persisted in 
printing the epistle dedicatory to the king. To us 
it is valuable as the only existing account of the 
labors of the revisers. Contrasting their deliberate 
course with the traditional haste with which the 
Septuagint was prepared. Dr. Smith says of the 
new book that ' ' it hath not been huddled up in 
seventy-two days, but hath cost the workmen, as 
light as it seemeth, the pains of twice seven times 
seventy-two days, and more." He acknowledges 
the labor of previous translators, both in England 
and beyond seas, owning that God had raised 
them up to do their good work, and saying that 
" they deserve to be held of us and of posterity in 
everlasting remembrance." In one or other of 
them the true rendering might be found, and in 
this new setting whatever is sound ' ' will shine as 
gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished." 
The revisers had never dreamed of making a new 
translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good 



THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. 105 

one, but rather to make a good one better, and 
from all to compile a Bible not justly to be ex- 
cepted against. This had been their endeavor and 
work. Consequently they had consulted the trans- 
lators and commentators in all languages—Chaldee, 
Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, lyatin, Spanish, French, 
Italian, and German. Nor did they disdain to revise 
what they had done, but brought back to the anvil 
that which they had hammered. They had used 
prayer as Augustine used it, crying : ' ' Ohj let thy 
Scriptures be my pure delight ; let me not be de- 
ceived in them, neither let me deceive by them." 
With this purpose, and in this spirit had they met 
together, ' ' not too many, lest one should trouble 
another ; and yet many, lest many things haply 
might escape them. ' ' So using all needful helps, 
not caring for the charge of slowness, nor coveting 
praise for expedition, they conclude by declaring 
in the same spirit of brave humility which had dis- 
tinguished them from the beginning, " We have 
at length, through the good hand of the Lord upon 
us, brought the work to that pass that you see." 

The revised version, newly translated out of the 
original tongues, and with the former 
translations diligently compared and 
revised by his majesty's special command, ap- 
peared in 1611. Richard Barker was the printer, 
paying well for the perpetual right. ^ The print- 

* Stoughton, p. 236. 



106 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE 

ing of the Bishops' Bible had virtually ceased when 
the authorized Bible was undertaken. The weight 
of ecclesiastical authority was given exclusively 
to the new version. It was appointed to be 
read in churches. The favor of the king would 
naturally be accorded to a work which he him- 
self had planned, and his inordinate vanity would 
find no difficulty in believing that his literary 
fame had indeed reached -' ' the farthest parts of 
Christendom," while the church recognized in 
him her most tender and loving nursing-father, 
and the nation at large saw in him that *' sancti- 
fied person who under God was the immediate 
author of its true happiness. ' ' ^ 

And yet, after so much royal and ecclesiastical 
patronage had been bestowed upon it, we are sur- 
prised to learn that * ' no evidence has yet been 
produced to show that the version has ever been 
publicly sanctioned by Convocation, or by Parlia- 
ment, or by the Privy Council, or by the king." ^ 

The critics were soon in the field tilting at it 
after their usual fashion. Poor Hugh Broughton, 
disappointed in his private enterprise, declared 
that the new version bred in him a sadness which 
would grieve him while life lasted. ''.It is," said 
he, "so ill done." He assured the king that he 
would rather be torn in pieces by wild horses 
than see it urged on the churches. The witch 

1 " Epistle Dedicatory." ^ Westcott, p. 158. 



THE AUTHOEIZED VERSION. 107 

mania, which soon after this time sent its disas- 
trous consequences even into New England, was 
already in the air, and the translators were accused 
of giving in to the superstition of the king in 
their use of such words as "familiar spirit," 
''witch," and "wizard." Kilbye, the learned 
Hebraist, who had sat in the Oxford compan}-, 
happening one day to worship in a village church 
in Derbyshire, was amused when the young 
preacher — ignorant that one of the revisers was 
among his hearers — inveighe.d against the transla- 
tion of several words, and in the case of one which 
seems to have been especially objectionable to him, 
gave three reasons why it ought to have been 
differently rendered. After the evening service the 
doctor had his revenge, telling the preacher that 
he had wasted his opportunity with the poor peo- 
ple in his congregation. As to his three reasons, 
he and his colleagues "had considered all of 
them, and found thirteen more considerable 
reasons why it was translated as now printed. ' ' ^ 

With more serious objections to the Authorized 
Version we shall concern ourselves in a later 
chapter. For the present, it is sufficient to say 
that before fifty years had passed it had won its 
way to the hearts of the English people, not so 
much because the king, the bishops, and the uni- 
versities lent it the sanction of their august 

1 Walton's " Lives." — Sanderson. 



108 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

names, as because it was intrinsically superior to 
all others. Even the Genevan Version gradually 
disappeared. The fickle fortunes of the house of 
Stuart waxed and waned. I^ong after his dynasty 
had vanished, the praises of James perplexed the 
boys and girls in the parish churches when they 
relieved the dullness of the sermon by poring over 
the famous dedication: For two centuries and a 
half the Bible of King James continued to merit 
the praise of Selden, the great lawyer : " The 
English translation of the Bible is the best trans- 
lation in the world, and renders the sense of the 
original best." Designed for public reading, it 
still answers its end admirably, and for majesty 
and sweetness will never be rivalled, certainly 
never surpassed. ' ' It lives on the ear like a music 
that can never be forgotten ; like the sound of 
church bells. Its felicities often seem to be things 
rather than words. It is part of the national mind, 
and the anchor of national seriousness. ' ' ^ 

1 Faber 



VII. 
BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 



" Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in 
the light ; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the 
kernel ; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look 
into the most holy place." — Preface to King James' 
Bible, 



CHAPTER VII. 

BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 

If the success of King James' Bible was not im- 
mediate, it was no doubt as rapid as the revisers 
expected. Their knowledge of human nature 
made them as moderate in their expectations as 
they were modest in their claims. Welcomed 
with suspicion instead of love, and with emula- 
tion instead of thanks, ' ' zeal to promote the com- 
mon good found," they said, "but cold entertain- 
ment in the world. " It was sure to be miscon- 
strued, and in danger of being condemned ; as 
would naturally be anticipated by those who turned 
either to history or to their own experience. The 
Commonwealth period was over before the Genevan 
Bible ceased to be the Bible of the homes, and in 
the churches the Bishops' Bible lingered in the re- 
moter parishes until the beginning of the eight- 
eenth century.^ 

Further revision was advocated in Parliament in 
1645, and only the dissolution of the long Parlia- 
ment prevented the passing of a bill providing for 
it. The project was supported by Owen, Cud- 
worth, Goodwin, Caryl, and others scarcely less 

' Edgar. 

Ill 



112 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

eminent for devoutness and learning. Happily the 
political crisis was not favorable to any further re- 
vision, and so the affections of the English peo- 
ple had time to twine about the book which in 
those dark and troublous times never failed while 
feeding their piety to foster their patriotism as well. 
The advocates of an amended translation con- 
tinued their agitation. Anglicans as well as Puri- 
tans were anxious for it. Of course they were not 
in the majority, otherwise the work would cer- 
tainly have been attempted. The people at large 
were content with what they already had. The 
disposition of the Evangelical party, even in our 
own century, was to lay great stress on the power 
of the word, not only as one expression of the 
truth, but also as the best expression of the truth 
which could be found. Mr. Scrivener, in his 
valuable ' ' Supplement to the Authorized English 
Version of the New Testament," trusts that it is 
not presumptuous to believe that God '' guided the 
minds of the first editors in their selection of the 
authorities on which they rested. ' ' ^ Meanwhile, 
that the revision needed to be itself revised, was 
abundantly plain. Providence had not superin- 
tended the printers, nor had he endowed King 
James and his company with knowledge in advance 
of their times. The successive editions disproved 

1 " A Supplement to the Authorized English Version of the New 
Testament." Introduction, pp. I-127. 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 113 

any such claims. More than four hundred vari- 
ations from the editions of 1611 appear in the 
edition of only three years later. In 1683, Dr. 
Scattergood carefully corrected the text ; and a 
still more complete revision was carried through in 
1769 by Dr. Blayney. It is to him that we are in- 
debted for the marginal explanations of weights, 
measures and coins, and of Hebrew proper names ; 
he amended the summaries of the Bible, and the 
running titles, and even ventured to correct some 
errors in the chronology. But advancing knowl- 
edge called for a work far more radical. There 
was a general belief that the Authorized Version 
failed in a multitude of instances to express the 
meaning of the original. The majority of these 
were of little moment, but popular rumor is sure 
to exaggerate, and rarely distinguishes. It was 
enough that the inaccuracies existed. The Cam- 
bridge paragraph Bible, 1873, gave a catalogue of 
the variations from the text of the Authorized 
Version as first published, which are now to be 
found in modern editions of the book, and the list 
occupied sixteen closely printed quarto pages. 
The Oxford Parallel Bible, 1885, made a selection 
from these deviations, and inserted them in their 
places in the margin. 

While the royal patent prevented any invasion 
of the printer's monopoly, experiments in transla- 
tion were continually appearing. An Authorized 

H 



114 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Version seemed to be warranted by the independ- 
ent translations which were continually appearing. 
The names of Purver, Macrae, Bellamy, Booth- 
royd, Doddridge, Macknight, Shairp, Thomson, 
Whiston, on the title-pages of various versions 
of the Old and New Testaments, were sufficient 
evidence that no one standard gave unity to the 
efforts of translators, who not infrequently indeed, 
represented conflicting doctrinal views. There was 
little uniformity of style either. The inflated taste 
of the period in which he lived made Doddridge 
prefer that the early believers should ' ' partake of 
their refreshment ' ' ^ rather than eat their meat 
(Acts 2 : 46), and that the sincere milk of the word 
(i Peter 2 : 2) shall be known rather as milk '* ra- 
tional and unmingled." The rugged individuality 
of Macknight set aside the corrupt comm^unica- 
tions (Eph. 4 : 29) of the Authorized Version in 
favor of " rotten speech *' ; and declared that the 
words of Paul about marriage might fitly be ren- 
dered : " For this reason shall a man leave his 
father and mother, and shall be glued to his 
wife, and the two shall become one flesh " (Eph. 
5 : 31). When it is added that in the century 
which preceded our present Revised Version 
twenty English translations of the New Testament 
were published, it may suggest itself to most 
minds that a careful and trustworthy revision of 

1 Edgar, p. m. 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 115 

the Bible was called for, if only to save the book 
from its friends. 

The condition of critical scholarship as our 
century passed into its last quarter, was especially 
favorable to a revision of the New Testament. 
Already Alford, BUicott, Lightfoot, Stanley, Farrar, 
had given us translations of the whole or of sepa- 
rate books. In America, which had taken its share 
in experimental versions, the scholarly labors of 
the Baptist American Bible Union had deepened 
the conviction that the hour had come when the 
whole Bible should be carefully revised, if not en- 
tirely re- translated. 

To the question of revision we must now turn. 
There were many reasons why a revision should 
be carried through, but there were reasons not less 
numerous and even more weighty, why the Au- 
thorized Version should remain as the basis of any 
new enterprise. 

What arguments, we may ask, favored a new 
version of the English Bible. 

I. The first was based on an objection often 
urged to the principle adopted by the translators 
of King James' Version, of translating one Greek 
word by more than one English word. Thus 
damnation^ condemnatio7i^ and in the margin, 
judgment^ are translations of one Greek word 
only. Eter7ial and everlasting ; impute^ county 
and account ; Comforter and Advocate ; covenant 



116 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and testament^ are additional illustrations of this 
unfortunate principle. The converse was equally 
disastrous. One and the same English word was 
used for many words in the original. Conversa- 
tion^ devil^ hell^ tempt^ each represents two dis- 
tinct words, and ordain^ "an important word 
ecclesiastically and theologically, ' ' ten. ^ 

2. Notwithstanding the constant revision to 
which the Authorized Version had been submitted, 
the condition of the punctuation, italics, and para- 
graphs, was still unsatisfactory. The many and 
conspicuous blunders of the original edition had 
indeed been corrected, but not a single Bible was 
printed which was not fairly exposed to serious 
objection. 

3. Perhaps it was too much to hope that we 
should ever see a Bible absolutely without note or 
comment. It was not unreasonable, however, to de- 
mand that the headings of the chapters should not 
mislead the simple-minded reader, and that in the 
marginal references exegetical skill should not be 
set aside at the bidding of theological bias ; or, 
worse still, of erroneous principles of interpretation. 

4. It was time that obsolete words should be 
dropped. There were not many of them, indeed, 
partly because the English of the Authorized Ver- 
sion was carefully chosen at the first, and partly 

1 " Brief Notes on the Critical History of the Text and English 
Version of Holy Scripture." Joseph Angus, M. A., D. D., p. 57^ 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 117 

because the version had itself embalmed words 
which might otherwise have fallen into ob- 
livion. But there were few readers of the Bible who 
could tell what was done to the flax when it was 
boiled (Bxod. 9 : 31). The peasant who knew 
a post only as "a thing that stood still to hang 
gates on or tie horses to," was puzzled to under- 
stand what Job meant when he said, My days are 
swifter than a post^ (Job 9 : 25). Why did 
Herodias demand that the head of John the Bap- 
tist should be brought in a cha^^ger (Matt. 14 : 8), 
when the only charger known to the majority of 
people was a horse? and why did Paul and his 
companions take up their carriages and go to Jeru- 
salem (Acts 21 : 15), when reason rather dictated 
that their carriages should take them ? 

5. Many forms of expression in the Authorized 
Version while at first admissible for their force, 
had in the lapse of time become unmusical if not 
unmeaning. That the early builders should say, 
Go to^ let us make brick (Gen. 11 : 3) ; that a cer- 
tain woman should cast a piece of millstone upon 
Abimelech's head and all to brake his scull 
(Judges 9 : 53) ; that of Moab it should be pre- 
dicted, with weeping shall they go it up (Isa. 15 : 
5), are cases in point. The use of his for its^ which 
for who^ either for each^ be for are^ also needed 
correction. 

1 Edgar, p. 371. 



118 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

6. Occasionally there were translations which 
may .perhaps have been clear to the translators 
themselves, but of which it was impossible for 
ordinary readers to make any sense. Especially 
was this ,so in the Old Testament. There are 
verses in Job and in the Prophets which convey 
no sort of meaning to the ear. We have heard of 
the pride of Moab ; he is very proud : even of his 
haughti7tess^ and his pride ^ and his wrath : but his 
lies shall not be so (Isa. i6 : 6), illustrates this.^ 

7. To the objections to the old version which 
are founded on its language, we may add that a 
number of words which had not become obsolete 
had changed their meanings. ' ' There are two 
hundred of them, and they affect the sense of many 
important passages." Among them are the fol- 
lowing : Apprehend^ co7iversation. frankly^ honesty 
let^ mortify^ piety ^ prevent^ quick^ religion^ spoil^ 
tale^ tradition^ In many instances these words 
and phrases conveyed a distinctly wrong thought 
to the mind of the reader. Numbers of devout 
students of the teachings of Jesus have been per- 
plexed because he is reported to have said : Take 
no thought for your life (Matt. 6 : 25), when what 
he did say was. Be not anxious for your life. It 
was a fretful foreboding and not a prudent fore- 
casting which our lyord forbade. 

1 Compare R. V., where the meaning is made clear. 
3 Angus, p. 53. 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 119 

8. It was only reasonable to believe that the 
scholarship of the companies who met at West- 
minster, Oxford, and Cambridge, sound as it was, 
would not bear comparison with that of the nine- 
teenth century. Much attention had been paid in 
the course of the intervening years to the ancient 
languages. The lexicons of to-day are more thor- 
ough and accurate, as well as more scientific in 
their arrangement, because greater attention has 
been given to the force of tenses, cases^ articles, 
and prepositions. It might not have been theo- 
logical bias so much as grammatical inaccuracy 
which wrote, Such as should be saved rather than 
those that were being saved (Acts 2 : 47). 

9. The marginal notes in the first edition of the 
Authorized Version were nearly as numerous as 
the marginal references.^ Those which suggested 
alternative readings might be considered afresh, 
and a conclusion arrived at as to their soundness. 
Should They houghed an ox take the place of 
digged down a wall (Gen. 49 : 6) ; and. The 7iorth 
wind bring eth forth rain^ of driveth away rain 
(Prov. 25 : 23), and I praise you^ brethren^ that 
you keep the traditions^ of keep the ordinances 
(i Cor. II : 2) ; and was it not full time that we 
read Eateth and drinketh (not " damnation ") but 
judgment to himself? (i Cor. ii : 29.) 

10. Was it not time also that passages confess- 

1 Edgar, p. 323. 



120 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

edly doubtful and probably spurious should be 
distinguished from those that were genuine? 
The touching story of the woman taken in adul- 
tery (John 8) was apparently a tradition — ^very 
likely with a basis of truth to it — which had crept 
into John's Gospel long after he wrote. In the 
account of the miracle at the pool of Bethesda 
(John 5) there were certainly verses whose later 
origin can scarcely be questioned. It was now 
generally although not universally believed that 
the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 
16 : 9-20) were not written by the evangelist. The 
doctrine of the Trinity did not stand in any need 
of the questionable support to be derived from the 
well known passage in John's first Bpistle (i John 
5 : 7), which Tyndale, Coverdale, and the Great 
Bible placed in brackets or distinguished by a dif- 
ferent type, but which the Authorized Version ad- 
mitted with no such suggestion as to its lack of 
authority. 

II. In the days of King James th^ current geog- 
raphy and natural history of Bible lands were very 
imperfect. lyittle attention had been given to ar- 
chaeology. Egypt and Babylon were less known 
to the revisers than to us is the heart of Africa or 
the North Pole. The present century had seen 
Palestine explored, Jerusalem largely recovered 
from her ruins, Nineveh and Persepolis unearthed, 
the faces of the Pharaohs loosed from their cere- 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 121 

ments, the land which was the scene of Joseph's 
trials and triumphs quickened into splendor again, 
and the footprints of Paul traced with such accu- 
racy and care that not even lyuke or Timothy 
seemed more than ourselves to be companions of 
his travels. The researches and discoveries of the 
nineteenth century had made the Bible a book 
more real and living than ever before. 
12. Even in the days of the Com- 
monwealth it was matter of complaint that the 
preachers would display their superior knowledge 
by differing from the Authorized Version. * * The 
original," they would inform their congrega- 
tion, "bears it better thus and thus." The 
consequence was that the weak stumbled and the 
doubting scoffed. It is needless to say that the 
habit of criticising the text from the pulpit had 
not diminished. Dull preachers, who consumed 
half of their own time and all of their hearers' 
patience by telling their congregation what the 
text did not mean, were scarcely more offensive 
than were the young divines just free from the 
swaddling clothes of the seminary and the cradle 
of the class-room, who launched out into the deep 
of Hebrew and Greek constructions, and floun- 
dered in textual criticism, when they might by 
the mercy of a little modesty have better con- 
tented themselves and made proof of their ministry 
by preaching the gospel. It would be well if by 



122 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

means of a scholarly revision of the Authorized 
Version these callow critics found their occupation 
gone. 

For these reasons, and for others besides which 
need not be recounted, it was argued that a revised 
version of the English Bible was urgently needed. 
But there were strong reasons for preserving, as far 
as possible in any future revision, the idiom and 
vocabulary of the Authorized Version. 

I. Made at the time when the English tongue 
was best fitted for its task, the Bible of King 
James was itself an evolution. Many of its hap- 
piest phrases were the result of repeated revision. 
To take only one example of this, how familiar 
to us is the exclamation of Jesus when he saw 
Nathanael coming to him. Behold an Israel- 
ite indeed^ in whom is no guile (John i : 47). 
Tyndale rendered the words, Behold a right 
Israelite. The Genevan Bible gave. Indeed an 
Israelite. The Rhemish Version, An Israelite in 
very deed. The Authorized Version alone caught 
the true rhythm. Dr. Eadie scarcely exaggerates 
when he says that our version of the Bible has 
" the fullness of the Bishops' without its frequent 
literalisms, or its repeated supplements ; it has the 
graceful vigor of the Geneva, the quiet grandeur 
of the Great Bible, the clearness of Tyndale' s, the 
harmonies of Coverdale's, and the stately theo- 
logical vocabulary of the Rheims." 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 123 

2. No doubt in great measure because they 
reaped the harvests of two centuries and more of 
patient research, the revisers succeeded in pro- 
ducing a work of surprising accuracy. It is a 
Roman Catholic scholar who writes about it, 
that " Bvery sentence,, every word, every sylla- 
ble, every letter and point, seem to have been 
weighed with the nicest exactitude, and ex- 
pressed, either in the text or margin, with the 
greatest precision."^ The substantial progress 
in biblical scholarship within this century, the 
examination or actual discovery of the oldest 
manuscripts of the Greek Testament, made fresh 
revision imperative. The varieties of readings in 
the New Testament, reckoned a hundred years ago 
at about thirty thousand, were now extended to 
five times that number ; ^ but the vast majority 
of those readings were of no practical importance. 
The passages in which there are divergencies 
affecting points of doctrine are very few in num- 
ber. There is no reason to believe that the faith 
of Christendom would suffer materially were the 
labors of the revisers in the reign of James to be 
left intact. A distinguished member of the New 
Testament Company, of 1883, sums up the excel- 
lencies of the Authorized Version by saying, " It 

1 Dr. Alexander Geddes ; quoted by Edgar, p. 313. 

2 " Companion to the Revised Version of the New Testament." 
Alex. Roberts, D. D., p. 7. 



124 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

is probably the best version ever made for public 
use. It is not simply a translation but a living 
reproduction of the original Scriptures in idiom- 
atic English, by men as reverent and devout as 
they were learned." ^ 

3. Published in 1611, our English Bible was 
associated with some of the greatest events in 
national and colonial history. The leaders in the 
civil wars were indebted to its stirring words for 
many a battle cry, and to its history of the men 
of whom the world was not worthy, for many 
an impulse to heroic self-sacrifice. Cromwell ex- 
horted his troops from its pages. Its dramas of 
ruin and redemption diverted the mind of Milton 
from the later legend of King Arthur on which 
he had purposed writing an epic. The very 
phraseology of the Bible seated itself at the coun- 
cils of the Commonwealth and forged for the 
Roundheads the weapons of controversy. When 
Charles II. recovered his throne, the book had so in- 
terwoven itself with all that was be^t and noblest 
in the life of the English people that the frivolity 
of the most frivolous of the Stuarts, and the base- 
ness of the basest of them — his successor, James — 
were powerless to weaken its hold. It would be 
almost possible to recover the Bible, were it lost, 
from the pages of Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress," 
and Baxter's ''Saints' Rest." The life of the 

1 Roberts, p. 89. 



BETWEEN THE VEESIONS. 125 

soul was nourislied not only by the truths of 
Scripture, but also by its very language. In the 
struggles of the English people for their civil 
rights and religious privileges, as well as in the 
conflicts of the greatest spiritual leaders ; in the 
Holy War which was waged in the tow^n of Man- 
soul, and equally in the storming of lycicester 
and the siege of I^ondonderry, the Bible of King 
James played a conspicuous part. It was as 
dear to the nation as was Magna Charta. Not 
less was it dear to the hearts of the Puritans and 
Pilgrims in the New World. Robinson launched 
the exiles from Holland with a prophecy that fresh 
light would break forth from God's word, and all 
colonial history bore witness to the prophetic 
strain in his famous utterance. 

4. Before two hundred years had passed away 
the Authorized Version had become an insepara- 
ble element in our noblest pulpit literature and in 
our most inspiring sacred song. To it South had 
been indebted for his virile English ; it moved 
in the majesty of Howe and the melody of 
Jeremy Taylor ; the passion of Baxter caught fire 
from its rhetoric ; the copiousness of Barrow drew 
its wealth from its pages ; there I^eighton nour- 
ished his unction, and there Thomas Fuller and 
Joseph Hall their wit. When the eighteenth 
century quickened the religious life of the coun- 
try afresh, Wesley found in the gospel his mes- 



126 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

sage of love, and from the lips of Jeremiali it was 
that Whitefield caught his impassioned plea, O 
earthy earthy earthy hear the word of her Lord. 
The prayers of the Puritans were largely expressed 
in the very language of the Bible, and this con- 
tinued to be not less true in Boston than it was 
in London, although unhappily in his preach- 
ing the New England divine learned too soon to 
trust to the subtleties of metaphysics rather than 
to the Thus saith the Lord of the book which 
made his fathers so brave and so confident. The 
rhymes of the Bay Psalm-book were uncouth and 
almost barbarous, but all that was best in them 
came from the English Bible ; while in England 
herself it was in the truths of the same books, and 
often in its very language that Doddridge found 
the inspiration of his polished lines. Watts the 
evangelical richness of his best hymns, and Charles 
Wesley the energy and enthusiasm which have 
crowned him supreme among the sacred singers 
of England. 

The history of the Authorized Version of the 
English Bible vindicated its claim to remain, even 
while it added force to the argument for a revi- 
sion. The great cathedral, which has fallen into 
disrepair, is far too sacred to the heart of the wor- 
shiper to be taken down, although its crumbling 
buttresses, its shattered carvings, its broken tra- 
cery may plead eloquently for careful restoration. 



BETWEEN THE VERSIONS. 127 

There was no temple in England comparable to 
her Bible for beauty ; about none clustered mem- 
ories so dear and so inspiring. 

The man who in our own age has been called 
the last of the Puritans, bore his testimony to the 
power which this book exercised over his whole 
life, when, in almost his last public utterance, 
he said : "I would add that not only have we 
confidence in the word of God in the critic's hand, 
but we have some of us proof of the word of God 
in our own daily life, and we would like to bear 
our own testimony to it. I have tested the word 
of God in great physical pain. I have had enough 
of it to be a good and sufficient witness thereto, 
and there is no pillow for an aching head that is 
like a promise from the word of God. And I have 
not been without struggles of another kind than 
physical ; but there is nothing wanted to sustain a 
man, to put soul into him, but to know that he is 
in accordance with the mind of Christ ; and to 
take the divine doctrines revealed in that book, 
and to feed upon them is to make him a giant re- 
freshed with new wine. The book is perfectly 
wonderful as to its results, when you test them." ^ 

Nor was it the least of its virtues that it was the 
Bible of America as well ; and that in the New 
World as much as in the Old its words were cher- 

' C. H. Spurgeon. Speech for British and Foreign Bible Society, 
1890. 



128 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

ished as an integral part of the nation's heritage. 
Both England and America might well engage in 
the pious task of revision, and find therein a new 
and firmer bond of union. The book was the com- 
mon possession of both, and both were interested 
alike in conserving its associations, and in mak- 
ing it a still more faithful reflection of the mind 
of the Spirit. 




VIII. 
THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS, 



*' When viewed simply in its literary aspect, the history 
of the growth of the Authorized Text involves a more 
comprehensive and subtle criticism, and is therefore filled 
with a deeper interest than any similar history." 

— Westcott, History of the English Bible. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 

The histor>' of the English Bible is substan- 
tially the history of the English tongue. 
From 1380, when Wycliffe completed 
the English New Testament, to 161 1, when the 
Authorized Version appeared, our language was 
passing through various stages of change and pro- 
gress. At first a tongue almost unintelligible to 
us to-day, it grew into a tongue differing from 
our own scarcely at all. A glance at some of the 
changes which our English Bible registers will 
now be in place. We must estimate at their true 
worth the successive transitions which consum- 
mated in the book of which Canon Liddon said : 
" When we take up the Bible we enter a splendid 
temple built not out of stone and marble, but with 
human words." 

John Purvey was an immediate follower of John 
Wycliffe. Eight years only passed after 
Wycliffe published his translation, be- 
fore Purvey published his revision of it. Yet even 
in that short time (i 380-1 388) the language was 
altering, both in the words themselves, and in 
their arrangement. A comparison of the two ren- 

131 



Wycliffe and Hereford, 1380. 
Gen. 41 : 43. And made him 
steye upon his secound chaar, cry- 
inge a bedel, that alle men shoul- 
den bifore him kneky and they 
shoulden wite hym to be prouest 
to all the loond of Egypte. 



132 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

derings will suffice to illustrate this. We take 

it from the history of Joseph : ^ 

Purvey's Revision, 1388. 
Gen. 41 : 43. And Faro a made 
Joseph to stie on his secound 
chare, while a bidele criede that 
alle men schulden kneele bifore 
hym, and schulden knowe that 
he was souereyn of all the lond 
of Egypt. 

The plural ending en in nouns was more com- 
mon then than now, and it is interesting to note 
that still more commonly it was used in the plurals 
of verbs. Thus we read in Purvey's Version : 
The disciplis zeden and didden as Jesus com- 
manded hem^ and thei broiizten an asse^ and the 
/ole^ and leiden her clothis on him^ and maden 
hym sitte above (Matt. 21:6, 7). 

The way in which prepositions are used seems 
strange to us now, although in some parts of 
England traces of the same usage linger yet. In 
the bigynnynge was the word^ and the word was 
at God (John i : i). In that tyme ihesus wente bi 
comes in the Saboth dai (Mark 2:23). The verbs 
derived from adjectives are often so expressive that 
we regret their loss in our language to-day. Eche 
that enhauncith hym schall be lowed, and he that 
mekith hym schall be hized (I^uke 14 : 11). Rarely 

1 For numerous references in this chapter I am indebted to Dr. 
Edgar's " Bibles of England." 






PORTION OF WYCLLFFfi's BIBLE, 

Page 132. 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 133 

is the language of Wycliffe or Purvey lacking in 
force, that one quality which is more likely to di- 
minish than to increase with the advance of cul- 
ture. There is, for example, a picture in one word 
when we read that, in the miracle on the lake of 
Galilee, the devils ^yent out from the man and en- 
tered into the swine, and with a birre the flok 
wente headlynge into the pool (lyuke 8 : 33), and 
when we are told that being called by Jesus, Bar- 
timeus castid aweie his cloth^ and skeppid^ and 
cam. There is more force than elegance in the 
early rendering of Jude 19 : Beestli men^ not hav- 
ynge Spirit^ instead of sensual^ having not the 
Spirit. Perhaps it is the graphic strength of Wyc- 
liffe' s Bible that more than anything else makes 
it so intelligible still. Words that have passed 
away, being dead yet speak. Especially in the 
North of England, where our language still carries 
a force which we search for in vain in the softer 
South, is this true. Not many years ago, when the 
experiment of reading Wycliffe's translation aloud 
was tried in Yorkshire, there was hardly a word or 
an expression which seemed at all peculiar.^ 

2. But it is in Tyndale's translation that we 
find most of the strength, as well as 
most of the sweetness of our Author- 
ized Version. To the laws of spelling he was as 

1 "Christian Annotator," Vol. III., p. 58; quoted by Eadie, Vol. 
I., p. 78. 



134 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

indiflferent as were his contemporaries. He was by 
no means confined to one way only for each word 
that he used. But he sinned in the best of com- 
pany, and it is conceivable that in our own day 
the next reform in spelling may leave us to the 
full as much license as was taken by the writers of 
the sixteenth century. Turning- to more import- 
ant matters, however, we may notice a few of the 
characteristics by virtue of which Tyndale's Verr 
sion won its high place in English literature. 
There is a graphic simplicity about it which cap- 
tures the ear at once. There were many comers 
and goers ^ that they had no leisure so moche as to 
eat (Mark 6 : 31), gives us at a stroke the restless 
crowd beside the lake ; All the city was on a roore 
(Acts 19 : 29), rouses for us the voices of the crafts- 
men of Ephesus ; the tempestuous wind called 
Euroclydon seems to blow harder when depicted 
as a flaw e ofwynde out of the north-easte (Acts 27 : 
14) ; and the Spirit searching even the deep things 
of God ^ fails to carry the force of the bottome of 
Goddes secretes (i Cor. 2 : 10). Tyndale's own 
experience with the ecclesiastical leaders of his 
day may have helped him to point his pen with 
such phrases as. He is pufte up and knoweth no- 
thinge^ but wasteth his braynes about questions 
and stryfe of words ; and If eny of you lacke wys- 
dom^ let him axe of God which geveth to all men 
indifferentlie^ and casteth no m,an in the teth. One 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 135 

of his translations : Likewis^ also the prelates 
mocking him^ so plainly betrayed the feeling of the 
exile banished by the bishops that it was changed 
in the next and revised edition.^ The music of 
Tyndale's translation with equal ease rises to the 
stately majesty of a march, or falls to the homelike 
sweetness of a mother's lullaby. The arrangement 
of words in such a sentence as Hosanna^ blessed 
is he that in the name of the Lorde cometh Kynge 
of Israel^ is in itself triumphal. The alliteration 
in the halte which was healed helde Peter (Acts 3 : 
11), impresses the scene on our memories ; we see 
the hungry multitude awaiting Christ's miracle 
with the loaves as they sate down here a row and 
there a rowe^ by hundreds and fifties ; there is 
truth as well as beauty in declaring that an avari- 
cious man is the thraldome ofidolatrie (Bph. 5:5); 
we catch with all its wonderful emphasis Paul's 
memorable cry in Alas ! /, caitiff man ^ who shall 
deliver me from my caitiff body (Rom. 7 : 24) ; 
and no one who has once heard it can ever lose the 
pathos of our Lord's tone in the expression : That 
lost child ^ which Tyndale gives us instead of that 
son of perdition^ to which we are more used. 

3. Coverdale was chiefly indebted to Tyndale, 
but he also used Dutch and Latin trans- 
lations of the Old Testament, and the 
influence of Lnther is very apparent. To origi- 

1 Eadie, Vol. I., p. 155. 



136 THE HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

nality he made no pretense. ^' Lowly and faith- 
fully, '' says he, in his dedication to the king, 
" have I followed mine interpreters, and that under 
correction." There are occasionally renderings 
which by their quaintness attract our attention; but 
they are rarely original, and as a rule, may be 
traced to the Vulgate, if they are not found in I^u- 
ther's translation. Such for instance, are O I who 
will geve my head waters ynough^ for ' ' Oh that 
my head were waters" (Jer. 9 : i) ; ^4 still soft 
hissings for " a still small voice " ; and hath compre- 
hended all the earth of the world in thie fingers^ 
for "the dust of the earth in a measure." The 
rendering of Jer. 8 : 22 : "There is no treacle in 
Galaad," transferred to the Bishops' Bible, won 
for it the name of The Treacle Bible, although 
Coverdale was responsible for the translation. Bet- 
ter known, although not so pleasant in its associa- 
tions, is his unfortunate rendering of the words so 
dear to us in our Authorized Version : ' ' Thou 
shalt not be afraid for the terror by night (Ps. 91 : 
5)," which Coverdale turns into : Thou shalt not 
nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night. Much 
happier is his translation of Isaiah 51 : 20 : Thy 
sons have fainted.^ they lie at the head of all the 
streets as a taken venyson. A captured deer is 
singularly helpless, and Coverdale' s choice of a 
word in this instance is remarkably graphic. The 
Scottish dialect of to-dav helps us to understand 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 137 

how the dove bare an olive branch in hir nebb 
(Gen. 8 : ii) ; but we have lost entirely that spe- 
cial use of a very expressive word which could ex- 
cuse Job's exclamation : What manner offelowe is 
the Almightie^ that we should serve him? (Job 21 : 
15). The translator shows that he can change an 
indifferent word for a better, when for Thou sendest 
gracious rayne upon thine inheritance^ and re- 
freshest it when it is dry^ that thy beastes may 
dwell therein^ was substituted " thy congregation. " 
4. The Genevan Bible, which in the Old Testa- 
ment remained in its first version, 

• ^i- XT nA 4. ^ A. D. 1557-60. 

was m the New Testament success- 
ively published in 1557 and 1560, at Geneva, and 
in Ivondon in 1576, with many changes introduced 
by Lawrence Tomson. The city of their exile was 
the city of two of the most accomplished scholars 
of their time, and we are not surprised that the 
translators were moved " with one assent to requeste 
two off their brethern, to witt, Calvin and Beza 
eftsounes to peruse the same, notwithstandynge 
their former trauells. " ^ It was the Latin New Tes- 
tament of Beza which most powerfully influenced 
the Genevan Version. But there were many emi- 
nent men about the same time occupied in the 
work of Bible translation. The scholarly air 
must have been congenial to the task, and Europe 
never saw a theocracy so nearly established as in 

1 Edgar, p. i66. 



138 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

those memorable years in the history of the bright 
little city of Geneva. The title by which the 
Genevan Bible is popularly known, " The Breeches 
Bible," comes from the rendering of the last 
clause of Gen. 3:7: They sewed figge leaves to- 
gether^ and made themselves breeches. But not- 
withstanding occasional archaisms, the Genevan 
Version is marked by refined diction. It gave to 
us many of the "words and phrases, and entire 
sentences which have ever since been retained in 
the English Bibles of the Protestant Churches," 
and many more " made their first appearance in a 
crude and unfinished form," which afterward more 
polished, took their place in the Authorized Ver- 
sion.^ 

The old-fashioned word " dame," which lingers 
yet in Eton School, is found in Hagar's answer to 
the angel, / flee from, my dame Sarai (Gen. 
16 : 8). As was fitting in the city of Calvin, the 
shout, " Good lucke, good lucke," which hails the 
crowning of the second temple in Coverdale's 
Version, becomes with the Genevans, Grace^grace. 
"Patron" has fallen into disuse with us, al- 
though it lingered long in Holland and lingers 
still in Italy; but in the first Genevan New Testa- 
ment we read : The under captayne believed the 
governor and the patron of the ship better than 
those things which were spoken of Paul (Acts 

' Edgar, p. 170. 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 139 

27 : 11). To the Genevan translators we owe the 
rhythm in the assurance : She hath received of the 
Lord'^s hand double for all her sins. The great 
words of Job : For I am sure that my Redeemer 
liveth^ and he shall stand the last on the earth 
(Job 19 : 25), is nearer to the original than are 
earlier renderings. The Authorized Version did 
well to retain the happy paraphrase in Acts 20 : 24, 
None of these things move rne^ and from Geneva 
also came the noble rendering of a critical passage : 
The cup of blessing which we bless^ is it not the 
communion of the blood of Christ? The bread 
which we break^ is it not the comTnunion of the body 
of Christ? (i Cor. 10 : 16.) 

5. If Coverdale was indebted to Tyn- 
dale, the Bishops' Bible was even more 
indebted to Coverdale. It differed indeed from 
former versions and anticipated the Authorized 
Version in being the work of many rather than of 
one. But the influence of Coverdale and of the 
Great Bible, which was little more than an 
amendment of it, is easily traced in many of the 
books of the Bishops' Bible. In others again it 
is evident that they appropriate the renderings of 
the Genevans. The English of the Bishops' 
Bible is not free from the affectations of that age, 
but occasionally it becomes graphic and (although 
not so often) melodious. He that is suretie for a 
stranger shall smart for it (Prov. 11 : 15), has 



140 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

passed into a " current proverb." There is point 
in, A housewifely woman is a crown unto her hus- 
ba7id (Prov. 12 : 4). The Authorized Version al- 
tered only slightly the vivid rendering from Na- 
hum's burden of Nineveh : The rattling of wheels^ 
the prancing of horses^ and the jumping of chariots 
(Nahum 3 : 2). The translation, Is there no treacle 
in Galaad? which, as we have seen, gave to the 
Bishops' Bible the nickname of the Treacle Bible, is 
not indeed as touching as our own : Is there no balm 
in Gilead? but at the time when it was made it 
was probably quite as accurate. We have to thank 
the Bishops' Bible for such renderings as : Right 
and light shall be with thee^ and with every one 
that is godly in thee (Dent. 33:8); and, Which re- 
joice exceedingly and are glad when they can find 
the grave (Job 3 : 22) ; and for a form which is as 
familiar in our ears as it is urgent on our con- 
sciences. Rend your hearts and not your garments 
(Joel 2 : 13). 

6. The Authorized Version was not 
only more faithful to the original 
than any which had appeared before it, but it was 
also a finer piece of English. Never before had 
our English tongue been so worthy as it was at 
just that time to do this work ; and it may confi- 
dently be affirmed that it has never been so worthy 
since. With the exception of the Roman Catholic 
version, each successive rendering of our English 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VEESIONS. 141 

Bible Had registered a higher mark than its pre- 
decessor. Preserving what was best, and amend- 
ing what was not satisfactory, our translators had 
moved on triumphantly through a formative pe- 
riod in the history of our language. When our Au- 
thorized Version appeared, it appeared as the sur- 
vival of the fittest in the choice of words and in the 
cast of sentences. Such is the genius of the Author- 
ized Version that we find ourselves in hearty accord 
with the poet Rogers, when he says : " Oh, the 
exquisite English of the Bible ! I often feel as if 
the translators as well as the original writers must 
have been inspired." 

All previous versions were laid under contribu- 
tion. No prejudice against Papist or Puritan was 
suffered to debar Rhemish or Genevan ; and if the 
translators of King James' Version rarely go back 
of the text of the Bishops' Bible to an earlier 
English rendering,^ this may be because this 
version was itself the harvest of the labors of its 
predecessors. How truly our English Bible is a 
growth will be seen if we trace the process of de- 
velopment through which a single verse passed 
before, like a fine piece of pottery, it had reached 
perfection. The words of Jesus, " Settle it there- 
fore in your hearts not to meditate before what ye 
shall answer " (Luke 21 : 14), read better in this 
their final form than the Genevan : Lay it by, 

1 Westcott, p. 338. 



142 THE HISTORY OP THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

therefore^ in your hearts^ that ye premeditate not ; 
as the Genevan was an improvement upon the 
Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible : Be at a sure 
point in your hearts not to study before ; and all 
of them are preferable to Tyndale : Let it sticky 
therefore^ fast in your hearts not once to study be- 
fore what he shall answer} Occasionally, but 
not often, the older versions are better than the 
new. '^ Took up our carnages " (Acts 21 : 15) is 
better than trussed 7ip our fardels^ of the Genevan ; 
and yet is inferior to took up our burdens as the 
Bishops' rendered the words of Luke ; while Tyn- 
dale's, made ourselves ready^ is perhaps not so 
close, but in all other points it is the happiest 
rendering of any of them. 

A whole chapter might be devoted to the sub- 
ject of printers' errors in various editions of the 
English Bible ; but no other purpose would be 
served by it than to entertain the reader with 
illustrations of the curiosities of literature. In the 
edition of the Authorized Bible, published in 163 1, 
the omission of the word not completely reversed 
the meaning of the seventh commandment, and 
probably the printer got his deserts when he was 
fined three hundred pounds for his blunder. A sim- 
ilar oversight mars many other Bibles, although 
never in so important a passage. Him that taketh 
away thy cloke^ forbid to take thy coat also (lyuke 

1 Edgar, p. 312. 



THE ENGLISH OF THE VERSIONS. 143 

6 : 29), is a command easier to obey than the orig- 
inal ; and such misprints as vinegar for "vine- 
yard," ate her for "hate her," eyes for "ears," 
cover eth for " converted," are curious examples 
taken from a sheaf of errors in the printers' chap- 
ter of accidents. The patent to print Bibles ex- 
clusively was not, perhaps, ill bestowed upon the 
Barkers, whose work was generally well done ; but 
certainly never was monopoly more shamefully 
abused than by a Mrs. Anderson, who, from 1676 
to 1711, was the licensed printer of Bibles for Scot- 
land. Her opponents scored a point against her 
when they extracted the following piece of con- 
fused type-setting from one of her Bibles printed 
in 1705: " whyshoulditbethougtathingincredible 
w* you, y* God should raise the dead?"^ No 
more powerful argument could be brought than 
is furnished by this comedy of errors for leaving 
with a nation the right to print and publish the 
book which is its peculiar treasure. The printers' 
monopoly was destined to follow the monopolies 
of churches and kings. The people may be trusted 
to see to it that no dishonor is done to the noblest 
achievement in their literature, and that the but- 
ter is brought forth in a lordly dish (Judges 5:25). 
The history of the English Bible from the time of 
Wycliffe to our own day is full of proof that the 
people are more conservative than the scholars, 

1 Edgar, p. 298. 



144 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and will not lightly suffer anything which savors of 
what they deem a tampering with the sacred text. 
Whatever may be the future of Bible revision, no 
changes in the English of our translations can 
affect the place which the Authorized Version 
holds in our literature, and certainly never was 
what Dante so happily calls " the sieve for noble 
words " used to higher advantage. 



IX. 
THE REVISED VERSION. 



" To whom was it ever imputed for a fault (by such as 
were wise,) to go over that which he hath done, and to 
amend it when he saw cause ? If we will be sons of the 
truth, we must consider what it speaketh, and trample 
upon our own credit, yea, and upon other men's too, if 
either be any way an hindrance to it." — Preface to King 
James^ Bible, 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE REVISED VERSION. 

On the loth of February, 1870, the Upper House 
of the Convocation of Canterbury, adopted a reso- 
lution looking toward revision, which ran thus : 

"That a committee of both Houses be appointed 
to report upon the desirableness of a Revision of the 
Authorized Version of the Old and New Testa- 
ments, whether by marginal notes or otherwise, 
in those passages where plain and clear errors, 
whether in the Hebrew or Greek text originally 
adopted by the translators, or in the translation 
made from the same, shall on due investigation be 
found to exist." 

The resolution was moved by Dr. Wilberforce, 
bishop of Winchester, and seconded by Dr. Hlli- 
cott, bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. That these 
men should have been willing to give their sanc- 
tion to such a movement spoke well for its ulti- 
mate success. Wilberforce inherited a great name, 
and had added fresh lustre to it. Although he failed 
to carry on the evangelical succession of which 
his father, by his writings and example was a fore- 
most ornament, he yet possessed not a little of his 
father's adroitness and very much of his father's 

147 



148 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

persuasive eloquence. Dr. ElHcott, in his turn, 
was in the front ranks of New Testament exe- 
getes, so that if the name of Wilberforce was 
likely to win popular approval for the proposal, 
that of his companion was, at all events, sure to 
command for it the respect of all scholarly men. 

Three months after the passing of this resolu- 
tion the two Houses of Convocation, with slight 
dissent, decided that a revision ought to be under- 
taken. The report in which this conviction was 
embodied proposed that Convocation, ''should 
nominate a body of its own members to under- 
take the work of revision, who shall be at liberty 
to invite the co-operation of any, eminent for 
scholarship, to whatever nation or religious body 
they may belong." It is obvious at once that a 
revision of the English Bible in a country such 
as England must originate with the Established 
Church if it is to attain to the dignity of a national 
achievement. The English people would be sat- 
isfied with no other. ' ' The Church of England is 
the mother of the Authorized Version, and has an 
undoubted right to take the lead in any move- 
ment for an improvement of the same. She still 
represents the largest membership, the strongest 
institutions, the richest literature, among those 
ecclesiastical organizations which have sprung 
from the common English stock. She would 
never accept a revision made by any other de- 



THE REVISED VERSION. 149 

nomination. She has all the necessary qualifica- 
tions of learning and piety to produce without 
foreign aid as good a version for our age as King 
James' revisers produced for their age."^ 

But the day has passed in which the Bnglish- 
speaking nations would be satisfied with a Bible 
carrying the imprimatur of any one section of 
the universal church. There is no longer a church 
established by law controlling all the countries in 
which the English Bible is read, and the threat 
which King James I. flung at the dissenters, " I 
will make them conform themselves, or else I will 
harry them out of the land, or else I will just hang 
them, that is all," if uttered by the sovereign to- 
day might cost him his head, and would certainly 
cost him his throne. The Committee of Convo- 
cation resolved to invite about forty biblical 
scholars, chosen from the Church of England 
and other churches, to share their labors. With 
very few exceptions — Cardinal Newman was one 
of these — the scholars who were invited accepted. 
The Episcopalians, as was naturally to be ex- 
pected, had the majority on the Committee of 
Revision when it first met, and a bishop presided 
over both the Old and New Testament companies. 
In 1880 the number of revisers amounted to fifty- 
two, and of these, thirty-six were Episcopalians 
equally divided between the two companies, while 

1 Roberts p. 91. 



150 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

the remainder were Presbyterians, Congregation- 
alists, Baptists, and Methodists, including one Uni- 
tarian. The Baptist members of the Committee 
were Dr. Benjamin Davies, whose profound learning 
and childlike piety made him the object of mingled 
reverence and love with his students of Regents' 
Park College, London ; Dr. Gotch, his life-long 
friend, who was at this time president of the Bap- 
tist College, Bristol ; and Dr. Joseph Angus, who 
by his loyalty to our principles, attainments, and 
statesmanlike sagacity, was the accepted represent- 
ative of the denomination. After a brief religious 
service in the chapel of King Henry VII., West- 
minster Abbey, the committee began its work on 
the 22nd of June, 1870. The New Testament 
company met in the Jerusalem Chamber, a large 
hall in the Westminster Deanery, which was itself 
rich in historical memories.^ Here, in the days 
which preceded the Reformation, the abbot and 
his friends gathered for social intercourse. Before 
the fire burning in the hearth — the fireplace in 
the room was one of the earliest fitted for burning 
sea-coal — King Henry IV. died. Disappointed in 
his hope to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, 
he found some solace in the name of the room 

" Bear me to that chamber ; there I'll lie : 
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."^ 

1 See paragraph at the end of this chapter. 
' Shakespeare " Henry IV." 



THE REVISED VEESION. 151 

The Scripture tapestries which hang from the 
walls looked down more than two hundred years 
later on the famous Westminster assembly of 
divines, who met here, as Thomas Fuller says, 
"for the building of Zion." Now after a lapse 
of two hundred and thirty years, the world was 
ready for this more conspicuous spectacle, this re- 
union of Christendom on the only basis on which 
that reunion will ever be possible. The preface 
to the Revised Version is dated from the Jeru- 
salem Chamber — the place of which Henry Ward 
Beecher said : " No room has greater interest for 
me, unless it be the ' Upper Room ' " — and will for 
all time be the noblest memory associated with 
its walls. When the two companies met simul- 
taneously, the Old Testament company assembled 
in the Chapter lyibrary of the Deanery ; at other 
times it also gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber. 

The New Testament Company had completed 
the first revision in about six years ; two years 
more were spent in a second revision, and only 
after two years and a half had passed were all the 
details reserved for final discussion settled, so that 
the work could be issued from the press. The 
Old Testament revision required fourteen years. 
From the preface to the New Version we learn 
that it was " completed in eighty-five sessions, 
ending on June 20, 1884 ; and it occupied seven 
hundred and ninety-two days. The greater part 



152 THE HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

of the sessions were for ten days eacli ; and each 
day the company generally sat for six honrs.'* 

The Committee had not been long at work be- 
fore the claims of America to a share in this 
enterprise were recognized. By the request of 
Bishop Bllicott, Dr. Angus, who visited the United 
States in 1870, conferred with some American 
scholars, and at his suggestion they drew up a 
plan of co-operation, and suggested a list of names, 
both of which, substantially, were approved b}^ 
the English Companies. " In view of the great 
distance, it was deemed best to organize a separate 
Committee, that should fairly represent the bibli- 
cal scholarship of the leading churches and liter- 
ary institutions of the United States. Such a 
Committee, consisting of about thirty members, 
was formed in 187 1, and entered upon active work 
in October, 1872, when the first revision of the 
synoptical Gospels was received. It was likewise 
divided into two Companies, which met every 
month (except in July and August) in the Bible 
House at New York, — but without any connection 
with the American Bible Society, — and co-operated 
with their Knglish brethren on the same princi- 
ples and with the intention of bringing out one 
and the same revision for both countries. Kx- 
President Dr. Woolsey, of New Haven, acted as 
permanent chairman of the New Testament Com- 
pany ; Dr. Green, professor in Princeton, as chair- 



THE KEVISED VERSIOIS^. 153 

man of the Old Testament Company. The two 
Committees exchanged the results of their labors 
in confidential communications." ^ 

In these committees the names of Dr. T. J. 
Conant and Dr. Howard Osgood, in the Old Tes- 
tament Committee ; and of Dr. Horatio B. Hackett 
and Dr. Asahel C. Kendrick, in the New Testa- 
ment Committee, did honor to the scholarship of 
our Baptist institutions of learning. 

That there should be certain difficulties in 
fusing the labors of two bodies so far separated 
as were the English and American Companies was 
inevitable. It was only in July, 1875, that a plan 
was matured for the consolidation of the inter- 
national forces. Dr. Schaff, himself the president 
of the American Committee, describes it thus : 
" The English revisers promise to send confiden- 
tially their revision in its various stages to the 
American revisers, to take all the American sug- 
gestions into special consideration before the 
conclusion of their labors, to furnish them, before 
publication, with copies of the revision in its final 
form, and to allow them to present in an appendix 
to the revised Scriptures, all the remaining dif- 
ferences of reading and rendering of importance 
which the English Committee should decline to 
adopt ; while, on the other hand, the American 
revisers pledge themselves to give their moral 

1 Roberts, pp. 92, 93. 



154 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

support to the Authorized editions of the Univer- 
sity Presses, with a view to their freest circulation 
within the United States, and not to issue an edi- 
tion of their own for a term of fourteen years." ^ 
Although the best part of the American labor is 
incorporated in the book itself, yet the appendix 
is a substantial memorial of independent scholar- 
ship, and it is safe to anticipate that many of the 
changes which it advocates will ultimately find 
their way into the margins of our Bible, and 
thence in turn into the text itself Where, how- 
ever, the American renderings affect the idioms 
of our language, it is questionable whether in 
their anxiety to be faithful to the original and 
consistent with the principles of translation 
which they had laid down for themselves, the 
revisers have not too often clouded the well of pure 
English undefiled which is so dear to all lovers 
of our tongue. One point more needs to be no- 
ticed here. "At an early stage in our labors," we 
read in the New Testament Preface, "we entered 
into an agreement with the universities of Oxford 
and Cambridge for the conveyance to them of our 
copyright in the work. This arrangement pro- 
vided for the necessary expenses of the undertak- 
ing ; and procured for the Revised Version the 
advantage of being published by bodies long con- 

1 " A companion to the Greek Testament and the EngHsh Version," 
Philip Schaff, D, D., pp. 66, 400, 401. 



THE EEVISED VERSION. 156 

nected with, the publication of the Authorized 
Version." The fact that the university publish- 
ers met the expenses of the English. Committee, 
and received in return the copyright of the Re- 
vised Version, while extremely honorable to the 
devotion and unselfishness of the Committee, left 
their American colleagues without means to pay 
the cost of their labor, and the English printers 
no guarantee as to the sale of the work in this 
country. The funds for the necessary expenses 
of the American revisers were contributed by 
private donors ; and as to the profit of the sale of 
the version in America, while the moral support, 
as we have seen, of those who engaged in the 
enterprise was cast on the side of the agents of 
the English publishers in this country, it was im- 
possible to do more than this. '' The New Ver- 
sion stands precisely on the same footing with the 
old version as to copyright : it is protected by law 
in England, it is free in America." 

On both sides of the sea the ripest scholarship 
of our century was freely given to this great work. 
A harvest to the publishers, there was not even 
a scanty gleaning for those who toiled under the 
burden and heat of the day. The tribute which 
the Preface pays to the American committee we 
may well adopt in reference to each body of the 
revisers. " We gratefully acknowledge their care, 
vigilance, and accuracy, and we humbly pray 



156 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

that their labors, thus happily united, may be 
permitted to bear a blessing to both countries, 
and to all English-speaking people throughout 
the world." 

For such a revision of the Scripture the time 
was certainly ripe. Unlike the plan adopted by 
the translators of the Authorized Version, the 
revisers did not now divide the books among 
sub-committees, "but each company assumed its 
whole share, thus securing greater uniformity 
and consistency " ; for one of the aims of the 
new version was to produce a work distinguished 
by greater consistency in the principle of transla- 
tion than is to be found in the older book. Five 
classes of alterations are mentioned in the Pref- 
ace to the New Testament, namely : Such as are 
positively required by change of reading in the 
Greek text ; such as are necessitated because the 
Authorized Version appeared to be incorrect, or 
to have chosen the less probable of two possible 
renderings ; alterations of obscure or ambiguous 
renderings ; alterations where the Authorized 
Version was inconsistent with itself ; and such as 
were rendered necessary by consequence — that is, 
arising out of changes already made, though not 
in themselves required by the general rule of 
faithfulness.* 

The advance in scholarship, as well as in dis- 

1 " Preface to the New Testament," Revised Version. 



THE REVISED VERSION. 157 

covery, during the nineteenth century seemed to 
demand that before its close a careful revision of 
our English Bible should be made. For a hun- 
dred years or more new translations of the whole 
Bible, or of important parts of it, had been appear- 
ing. Campbell and MacKnight and Newcome did 
the work before the eighteenth century had passed 
away ; during the first half of our century, Noah 
Webster and Nathan Hale in America, and in 
England Samuel Sharpe and many others had 
given practical expression by their independent 
versions to the sense of dissatisfaction with the 
Authorized Version. ^ From 1850 onward, it seemed 
as though the scholars who were to do the work of 
revision were already gathering in the field. Five 
Anglican clergymen published in 1857 ^^^ Gospel 
of John and the Pauline Epistles, and of these. 
Dean Alford and Bishop Ellicott were afterward 
chosen among the revisers, although Alford's 
death (January, 1871), closed his arduous and 
successful labors as a New Testament exegete. 
Four English scholars, Gotch, Davies, Jacob, and 
S. G. Green — three of them Baptists — ^prepared a 
Revised English Bible, much of which must have 
anticipated the action of Convocation. "The 
American Bible Union, a Baptist organization 
in America, spent for nearly twenty years a vast 
amount of money, zeal, and labor on an Improved 

1 Schaff, p. 366. 



158 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Version, and published the New Testament in full 
and the Old Testament in part, with learned com- 
ments, the best of them by Dr. Conant, on Job, 
Psalms, and Proverbs."^ At no previous time 
had the text of the New Testament been so ready 
for translation, and never before had the lands of the 
Bible been so well understood. 

The Preface to the Revised Version describes 
with sufficient fullness the rules which the com- 
panies adopted. If they erred at all, they cer- 
tainly erred on the side of caution. The Episco- 
pal Church was true to its traditional reputation 
for conservatism. Only very occasionally were 
changes made which seriously affected the tradi- 
tional text. The concluding clause of the Lord's 
Prayer was omitted from the Gospel by Matthew, 
but it was given a place in the margin. The last 
twelve verses of th.e Gospel by Mark were pre- 
served, although they were now separated by a dis- 
tinct space from the early part of the chapter, and a 
marginal note left their genuineiiess in doubt. 
Important doctrinal teaching was affected by the 
new version of such passages as 2 Tim. 3:16 and 
2 Tim. 2 : 26. In the few instances in which the 
Authorized Version left the sense obscure — such 
as Heb. 4 : 8 — 2, simple change cleared the text 
up at once. In the Old Testament, the sur- 
prise was not that so much, but that so little had 

1 Schaff, p. 367. 



THE REVISED VERSION. 159 

to be altered. The revisers have frequently given 
expression to their admiration for the scholarship 
of the translators who met at the bidding of King 
James. As a summary, it may be said that out 
of the seven hundred and ninety-one thousand 
four hundred and forty-four words composing the 
Revised Bible, seven hundred and twenty-one 
thousand six hundred and seventy-one are the 
same as are found in the old version. Only nine 
per cent. — seventy thousand seven hundred and 
seventy-two — have been changed ; while sixty-five 
thousand five hundred and eight have been ex- 
cluded. 

The New Testament was ready for publication 
early in 1881. On the 17th of May, Bishop Blli- 
cott, who had been associated with Bishop Wil- 
berforce eleven years before in moving Convoca- 
tion to action, laid the first copy of the Revised 
New Testament before that body, and proceeded 
to give a brief history of the work which was now 
completed. Already a million copies had been 
called for in England and America. Within a few 
days of its publication nearly three hundred and 
sixty-five thousand copies of the Clarendon Press 
edition had been sold in New York. Other edi- 
tions rapidly appeared. Two daily papers in Chi- 
cago had the book telegraphed to them from New 
York, and gave it complete in their columns as soon 
as possible after publication. It is estimated that 



160 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

less than a year had passed before three million copies 
had been bought in Great Britain and America. 
The entire Bible was published on the 19th of 
May, 1885, and if the excitement attending the 
publication of the New Testament was absent on 
this occasion, the feeling was deeper and more 
serious, and the general judgment on the book 
was more satisfactory. For, as must alw^ays be 
recognized in any history of the English Bible, 
during the four years which passed since the Re- 
vised Version of the New Testament appeared, it 
had gone through a furnace of criticism. Although 
the proportion of changes in the new version is 
not large, yet it is sufficient to warrant Dr. Mom- 
bert's opinion: "The term revision seems to 
have been construed very liberally ; for strictly 
speaking the Revised Version is a new translation 
on the basis of the Authorized Version."^ Had 
the revision stopped with the New Testament 
these words would have been especially true. Of 
necessity the Old Testament was less changed. 
The scholarship of the church had concerned it- 
self during the first part of the nineteenth century 
with Greek rather than with Hebrew. The con- 
troversies now waging in England and America 
over the Old Testament Scriptures had not then 
assumed such importance. While there were 
many passages in the Authorized Version of the 

1 Mombert, p. 464. 



THE REVISED VEESION. 161 

Old Testament whicli were obscure, and some 
whicli were even unintelligible, yet on the whole 
there was less scope for delicate and discerning 
scholarship in dealing with it, than there was in 
revising the New Testament. Possibly the unfa- 
vorable reception given to many of the revised 
readings of the New Testament company made 
their brethren of the Old Testament company 
more conservative. However this may have 
been, it is certain that the appearance of the 
complete Bible in the Revised Version was not 
assailed by the opposition which greeted the New 
Testament alone. 

On a calm examination it was found that there 
were very few changes which seriously affected the 
doctrinal teaching of familiar verses. Here and 
there indeed, a text was so entirely altered that 
the preacher saw with reluctance his favorite ser- 
mon wrecked almost before its voyage began, and 
had no alternative but to abandon his discourse, 
unless he was prepared to sail under false colors. 
The revision of the Scriptures has drawn attention 
afresh to the importance of exegesis, and is fast 
making it impossible for even the most unscrupu- 
lous pulpit orator to treat his Bible as no other 
professional man, with an atom of self-respect, 
would dare treat his text-books. 

The fiercest onslaught upon the text of the Re- 
vised Version was made by Dr. Burgon, dean of 



162 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Chichester, a man of genuine if somewhat unequal 
scholarship, but of a temper so willful and impetu- 
ous that it virtually unfitted him for controversy. 
Twelve years before the new version appeared. 
Dean Burgon had published an elaborate defense 
of the genuineness of the last twelve verses of 
Mark. He now hastened into the field with three 
articles in the Quarterly Review, which were after- 
ward issued in one volume under the title of ' ' The 
Revision Revised, ' ' and in which, after criticising 
the English of the version as "hopelessly at 
fault," — an opinion in which he was supported by 
so eminent a judge as Matthew Arnold, — he pro- 
ceeded to consider at length the systematic depra- 
vation of the underlying Greek as nothing else but 
**a poisoning of the 'River of Life' at its sacred 
source." Men of cooler judgment, although pos- 
sibly of inferior scholarship, while not prepared to 
go to such lengths as Dean Burgon, have come to 
the conclusion that the revisers may have adopted 
too narrow a conception of what a translation 
should be. They have inquired whether it is safe 
to lay so much stress on the shades of meaning in 
words and tenses, or the precise force of particles, 
in translating the language of writers who were 
not themselves as a rule practised grammarians. 
They have pointed to passages in the Authorized 
Version where a happy paraphrase has seemed to 
do justice to the mind of the spirit as a literal 



THE REVISED VERSION. 163 

translation would not.^ Such questions, however, 
belong to the critic rather than to the general 
reader. The great majority of the people to whom 
the Bible was dear, hailed the Revised Version 
with pleasure ; bought it when it appeared with 
eagerness ; glanced over its pages with interest ; 
and then returned to the Authorized Version, grate- 
ful that they had been deprived of so small a por- 
tion of their household treasure. The men who 
had inherited the Puritan love for the very letter 
of the Scriptures were many of them indignant 
at proposed changes which would rob them of texts 
familiar in their mouths as household words. ' ' We 
did not need," Mr. Spurgeon wrote, in noticing 
the Revised Old Testament, ' ' a blunder Bible to 
complete the series of eccentric Scriptures. How- 
ever, good has come out of evil ; The 
old Authorized Version sits secure upon 
its throne. There is none like it ; nor is there 
likely to be. ' ' Dean Burgon warned the Canadian 
Episcopal Synod against sanctioning ' ' the grossest 
blunder of the age." Mr. Gladstone wrote to the 
fiery dean in terms more politic, certainly, but still 
adverse to the English of the new version ; and the 
devout Ivord Iddersleigh, himself as competent a 
scholar as Mr. Gladstone, was of opinion that " the 
travesty of the whole text of the Scripture de- 
stroys far more than it can possibly give in re- 

1 Mombert, p. 17. See also Schaff's " Companion, etc.," p. 46. 



164 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

turn, 'ij Enthusiastic admirers of the splendid prose 
of the Elizabethan era sarcastically characterized 
the language of the revision as " Fifth Form Eng- 
lish," and Dr. A. K. H. Boyd, as a man of deli- 
cately attuned ear, found it ' ' not irritating but in- 
furiating." That the rhythm of the Authorized 
Version had often been sacrificed on the altar of 
grammatical accuracy was recognized by Dr. 
Howard Crosby, and perhaps other of the revisers, 
and Mr. John Bright— who in common with his 
friend, Mr, Gladstone, preferred such archaic forms 
as "Our Father which art in heaven," to "who 
art in heaven," — expressed the general feeling in 
reference to the English of the new version when 
he said : " I do not think the revisers understood 
English as well as the translators of the Authorized 
Version, however much better they may have 
understood Greek." In two successive volumes, 
Mr. G. Washington Moon, who had constituted 
himself the guardian of the Queen's English, ex- 
posed the reviser's violations of the ' laws of lan- 
guage with a minuteness which made his readers 
grateful that he had not lived two centuries and a 
half earlier, to break a lance with the English of 
the King James' Company. He probably gave 
utterance to a growing conviction when he refused 
to see in the new version anything more than an 
experiment, which the revisers issued preliminary 
to one that would in due time appear with the sane- 



THE KEVISED VERSION. 165 

tion of royal and ecclesiastical authority. What 
is certain, is that although the work was begun at 
the instigation of Convocation, the Revised Ver- 
sion has not as yet taken the place of the Author- 
ized Version in the services of the Established 
Church of England. It has not received the sanc- 
tion of the great Bible Societies. With few ex- 
ceptions, it has not found its way into the pulpits 
of our churches, and these exceptions are not of 
such weight as to warrant the confident prediction 
of Dr. Schaff that the old version is ' ' now doomed 
to a peaceful and honorable burial. ' ' ^ There is 
still too much love for the noblest language used 
in the holiest services, too much inherent and often 
unconscious delight in stately and melodious 
rhetoric, as well as too much attachment to the 
book which, more than any other, is associated 
with all that is most heroic in our history and most 
sacred in our experience, for such a forecast as this 
to be verified. No doubt the Revised Version ap- 
peared at the most favorable time for the claim of 
textual accuracy, but it appeared also in an evil time 
for the claims of good English. It was no fault of 
the revisers that troopers and traders in the reign of 
King James used language richer and more musi- 
cal than is used by ministers of religion and mem- 
bers of Parliament in the reign of Queen Victoria. 
The golden era of our tongue had passed away 

1 SchafF, p. 370. 



166 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

long before the companies met in the Jerusalem 
Chamber. 

But it must always remain a matter for regret 
that a profound acquaintance with the dead lan- 
guages was not accompanied in the case of the re- 
visers by an adequate reverence for the living 
tongue with which they were dealing. 

There were masters of English still with us 
when the revision was making who, not less than 
the revisers themselves, loved the Bible ; who 
with intelligence equal to theirs, pored over its 
pages, and whose exquisite appreciation of melody 
might have preserved without any sacrifice of 
textual accmacy, ' ' the happy terms of expression, 
the music of the cadences, the felicities of the 
rhythm of the Authorized Version." Tennyson, 
the most melodious of the Victorian poets, was 
himself a competent Greek scholar ; Matthew 
Arnold, who had no superior in clear and forcible 
English, had made studies in the Old Testament ; 
John Bright was the foremost orator of his time, 
and scarcely a week passed in which in his home 
circle the Bible, read aloud with his noble empha- 
sis, did not receive a new tribute of exposition ; 
while the greatest prose writer of the century, 
John Ruskin, had been trained from his mother's 
knee in passionate devotion to the language of the 
Scriptures. It may fairly be questioned whether 
ever again will so many masters of our tongue be 







eVRKE DO»)WlH& 






Page 167. 



THE REVISED VERSION. 167 

available for such a service as these men, and 
others who might be named, could have rendered 
to the revisers. But the opportunity was lost, and 
because of its loss the whole English-speaking- 
world is the poorer to-day. The years which have 
now passed since the Revised Version appeared have 
virtually settled its place in the history of the Eng- 
lish Bible. Already there are indications that the 
revision may itself need to be revised, nor does 
there seem to be any good reason why, with our 
increasing knowledge of the lands and languages 
of the Bible, another new revision shall not come 
in due time. Meanwhile the lover of his Bible 
should be the first to acknowledge the great debt 
which he owes to the men who in England and 
America, working harmoniously together for 
nearly fifteen years, gave to us the most valuable 
commentary upon the Scriptures that has ever 
been published. The Revised Version may never 
supersede the Authorized, but it has already added 
immensely to our knowledge of the book to which 
alike the companies in the seventeenth and the 
nineteenth centuries consecrated so much of their 
learning and of their lives. 

So much interest attaches to the Jerusalem 
Chamber^ the room in which the work of the re- 
visers was carried on, that the following informa- 
tion^ for which I am indebted to H. Burke Down- 



168 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

ing, Esq., F. R. I. B. A., will be welcome to 
the reader : ' ' The Jerusalem Chamber is an apart- 
ment or council chamber adjoining the grand 
dining hall of the abbots' palace, now the dean- 
ery of Westminster, which after the fashion 
of the age in which it was built, is arranged 
around an irregular quadrangle that goes by the 
name of Cheyney Gate Manor. Stanley, in his 
* Memorials of Westminster Abbey,' says of it that 
already ' even in the middle ages it had become 
historical. ' In the time of Henry IV. it was still 
but a private apartment, the withdrawing room or 
guest chamber of the abbot — opening on one hand 
into the abbot's refectory, on the other into his 
yard or garden — -just rebuilt by Nicholas Lilling- 
ton, and deriving the name of 'Jerusalem,' prob- 
ably from the tapestries or pictures of the history 
of Jerusalem, as the Antioch Chamber in the pal- 
ace of Westminster was so called from pictures 
representing the siege of Antioch." 



X. 

IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



**As a mere literary monument, the English of the 
Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, 
while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its 
appearance the standard of our language."— ^/i?-^;^ Rich- 
ard Green, "■ 



CHAPTER X. 

THE BIBLE IN ENGUSH I.ITERATURE. 

The hundred years which lie between 1550 and 
1650 gave birth to more men who were destined 
to great literary distinction than has any other 
period of equal length in English history. To 
understand how true this is, it is only necessary 
that we try, for a moment, to conceive what our lit- 
erature would be were that century dropped out of 
our annals. So much was it the flower and crown 
of the years which preceded it, and so much has it 
molded and inspired the years which have fol- 
lowed, that in case this century was lost, it is 
really hard to see what would be left. Never was 
nobler thought wedded to a richer tongue. This, 
indeed, was its special glory, and to this hour does 
it remain its supreme distinction. Recall the 
names of only a few of the writers who made this 
age illustrious. When was literary form finer, when 
was intellectual vigor more abundant? To lose 
that hundred years would be to lose Raleigh, who 
turned to literature after the most brilliant course 
ever run by a soldier of fortune, and doing so added 
fresh lustre to his renown ; and Spenser, who gave 
his name to the stanza which errs only, if it err 

171 



172 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

at all, by excess of sweetness ; and Hooker, almost 
alone in the host of theologians for his command 
of stately prose ; and Shakespeare, with the peer- 
lessness of his range ; and Isaac Walton, who rep- 
resents the best speech of our daily life, and who has 
taught us how to bait our hook, in language which 
almost makes us envy the worm dying to such pleas- 
ant music ; and Jeremy Taylor, the poet of the pul- 
pit, and his rival, Robert South, who wielded as 
no other Englishman has the dangerous weapons 
of irony and scorn. Nor would the loss be any less 
in the sphere of thought. What should we do 
without Bacon, who makes science as clear as a 
summer brook ; and quaint George Herbert, the 
most devout of our English poets ; and Milton, 
who moved as masterfully among his words as 
Satan amid his legions ; and Leighton, the divine, 
so rich in unction ; and Owen, the theologian, 
more voluminous than luminous indeed, but tread- 
ing serenely lofty levels of holy speculation ; and 
Baxter, whose fervor glows forever in his impetu- 
ous appeals ; and Bunyan, who, by virtue of his 
marvelous familiarity with the soul's pilgrimage, 
traveled all the road from Destruction to Deliver- 
ance, and closed with notes that even an angel 
before the throne might emulate? The loss of 
such a period as this hundred years would be not 
so much the loss of the keystone to the arch, as 
the loss of the arch itself, and that the centre-arch 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 173 

in the bridge of English literature. Where we 
looked for the highest point and the surest footing 
we should find, to our dismay, not a delightful 
thoroughfare, but only a dangerous chasm with a 
threatening torrent in its depths. 

Now it was when this great centur}^ was at its full 
tide of literary splendor that the Authorized Ver- 
sion of the English Bible saw the light. At once 
it put itself into a place where it challenged com- 
parison with the masterpieces of our tongue. How 
triumphantly it has stood the test, all the years 
since have shown. A sagacious critic of our own 
times expresses the universal conviction, when, 
speaking of it in the same breath with ^ ' The 
Divine Comedy" of Dante, Milton's ^* Paradise 
lyost," and Victor Hugo's " Les Miserables," he 
characterizes our English Bible as "great art." 
Addressing himself to those who might possibly 
make journalism their profession, Mr. Charles A. 
Dana, a master of his craft, has said lately: ''There 
are some books that are absolutely indispensable 
to the kind of education that we are contemplating 
and to the profession that we are considering ; and 
of all these the most indispensable, the most use- 
ful, the one whose knowledge is most effective, is 
the Bible. There is no book from which more 
valuable lessons can be learned. I am considering 
it now, not as a religious book, but as a manual of 
utility, of professional preparation and professional 



174 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

use for a journalist. There is, perhaps, no book 
whose style is more suggestive and more instruc- 
tive, from which you learn more directly that sub- 
lime simplicity which never exaggerates, which 
recounts the greatest event with solemnity of 
course, but without sentimentality or affectation — 
none which you open with such confidence and lay 
down with such reverence : there is no book like 
the Bible. "^ Such estimates as these are only 
samples from the accumulating testimonies of men 
of high attainments to the worth of our English 
Bible as literature. 

But we must not be understood as claiming for 
the language of the Bible in our hands to-day that 
it originated in the reign of James I. To do jus- 
tice to the influence of this one book upon our 
literature, we must go much farther back than 
this. As the first sounds which the infant catches 
are often the syllables of some pious nursery rhyme, 
so our language listened in its earliest days to the 
very truths, and in many instances, to the very 
words now embalmed in our own Bible. 

I. First of all, in our study of the influence of 
this book upon our literature, we must notice how 
powerfully it told upon the history of the language. 
Familiar as we are with the fact that in the pres- 
ent century Christian missionaries have in many 
instances made a language and a literature for 

1 Address at Union College, Schenectady, 1893. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATUEE. 175 

the heathen nations to which they carried the gos- 
pel, it may not have occurred to us that very much 
the same process went on in Europe itself in the 
earlier years of our era. Ulfilas was not merely 
the apostle of Christianity to the Gothic race. 
Through his translation of the Scriptures into 
Gothic, he was also the father of Teutonic litera- 
ture. This version — a portion of which is to-day 
the richest treasure in the library of the Swedish 
University of Upsala — is the greatest monument 
which Ulfilas himself reared to commemorate his 
success "as a way-breaker and a scholar. By it 
he became the first to raise a barbarian tongue to 
the dignity of a literary language ; and the skill, 
knowledge, and adaptive ability it displays makes 
it the crowning testimony of his powers, as well 
as of his devotion to his work. ' ' ^ The work of 
Ulfilas was by no means singular. From the first 
the English Bible has been a conserving power in 
the English language. Carried down from one 
generation to another, the very vocabulary has 
been maintained to no little extent because it en- 
deared itself to the aspirations, the passions, the 
confessions, the joys, and the griefs of the human 
soul. It is said that five-eighths of the language 
spoken by Alfred the Great circulates in England 
to-day, and who can question that it is largely to 
this one cause that this remarkable preservation 

1 ** Encyc. Brit.," art. " Ulfilas." 



176 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

must be ascribed? The very tongue that we 
speak is biblical ; and by this we do not mean 
that it is the tongue of the Elizabethan or Jaco- 
bean times only or chiefly. ' ' Its genealogy is to 
be traced up in a direct line through every state 
of biblical revision to the Latin Vulgate, and the 
common English ancestor of every such revision 
is the Wycliffite Bible of the fourteenth century." ^ 
Changing only its spelling, the Bible of John Wy- 
cliflfe can be read by an Englishman now almost 
as readily as can the Bible of King James, In its 
turn, the Bible of Wycliffe was an evolution from 
versions earlier yet. Archbishop Cranmer claimed 
that many years before the Norman Conquest the 
book was '' translated and read in the Saxon's 
tongue," and, although his statement was proba- 
bly too sweeping, English literature still looks 
back across twelve centuries to the Venerable 
Bede consecrating his last hours to the translation 
of the Scriptures ; and seeing the whole scholar- 
ship of the time summed up in him, honors Bede, 
in the well-known words of Edmund Burke, as " the 
father of English learning. ' ' 

The Norman Conquest for a time 
' checked the advance of letters. Even 
among the monks, scholars were few. For a hun- 
dred and fifty years after the battle of Hastings a 
little learning seems to have gone a long way. 

1 "Encyc. Brit.," art. "English Bible." 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 177 

But another battle, not so speedily decided, was 
waging all this time between the vernaculars. 
Numbers of old words became obsolete. The ver- 
sions of the Scriptures were invaluable in main- 
taining at this transition period the famous maxim 
of Horace, to be neither the last to use an old 
word, nor the first to use a new. Speaking of the 
Bible at this time, Cranmer says : ' ' And when this 
language waxed old and out of common usage, 
because folk should not lack the fruit of reading, 
it was again translated into the newer language, 
whereof yet also many copies remain, and be daily 
found." ^ The revolution in the English tongue 
was not by any means a misfortune. The texture 
of the robe indeed remained the same, but it was 
now embroidered in gold and crimson, and resplen- 
dent with gems. Heard once more in the court, 
it was a richer language for the sea-change which 
it had suffered. Two centuries after 

A. D. IS^S. 

the Conquest, the first Royal Procla- 
mation in English was issued. In 1363, Parliament 
was opened by an English speech from the throne. 
Following the policy of quiet absorption, which 
the English nation has constantly pursued, — and 
that by no means in literature only, — the English 
tongue had taken into itself the best and richest 
elements of the Norman French ; but the people 
in their common speech and popular ballads, had 

» "Encyc. Brit.," art. "English Bible." 
M 



178 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

never surrendered their vocabulary to the Con- 
queror.^ The poetr}^ of Chaucer is only one 
among many witnesses to the fact that all this 
while the words of the Bible were familiar in the 
ears of all sorts and conditions of Englishmen. 
Thus the language was molded to Wycliffe's hand 
when before the fourteenth century ran out he 
crowned its annals with his translation of the 
Scriptures. It will remain forever worthy of the 
consideration of the student of English literature 
that the two great versions of the Bible into the 
mother tongue appeared at the two great periods in 
the history of that tongue ; in the reign of Richard 
II. , when the language had recovered from the ef- 
fects of the Norman Conquest, and grown rich by its 
experience, and in the reign of James I., when the 
glow and splendor of the Elizabethan era flung a 
robe before the advancing steps of Scripture more 
rare and splendid than that which Raleigh in the 
story laid at the feet of the "Virgin Queen." 

The influence of Wycliffe's Bible on our Eng- 
lish literature can scared}^ be exaggerated. Lech- 
ler says that it marks an epoch in the development 
of the English language almost as much as Lu- 
ther's translation does in the history of the German 
tongues.^ To the historian Green, Wyclifife is as 
truly the father of our later English prose as 

1 Ward's " Chaucer," p. 19. 

2 Lechler's " Wycliffe," Vol. I., p. 347. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 179 

Chaucer of our later English poetr>^^ While the 
court poets were decorating their lines with the 
flowers of an exotic and artificial phraseology,^ 
WyclifFe, and those associated with him, were 
preserving the strongest elements of the mother 
tongue ; and so completely was this done that the 
great reformer probably deserves to be credited 
with the creation of a style, full of rough vigor, 
picturesque beauty, and crystalline clearness — a 
style to this hour " understanded of the people." 
Nor must we forget that Wycliffe — and even more 
than he, Tyndale — ^battled not only with the un- 
wholesome fashions of the court, but also with the 
unscholarly prejudices of the clergy. We smile 
as we listen to the assumption of the Romish 
priest of to-day that "the old, unchangeable 
Church of Christ can have no more suitable alli- 
ance than that of her inseparable handmaid, the 
old, unchangeable, and well-deserving I^atin."^^ 
But such words as these may serve to recall the 
struggle which, more than any other one book, 
Tyndale's new Bible ended between the ignorant 
masses of the clergy, who denounced Greek and 
Hebrew as the fatal sources of heathenism and Ju- 
daism,* and the new learning which insisted upon 

1 Green's " History," Vol. I., p. 489. 

2 Marsh, " Lectures on the English Language," p. 168. 

3 " The Stranger's Guide at High Mass," p. 4. 
* Westcott, p. 164. 



180 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

its right to draw tlie water of life straight from the 
fountain head. It is even more to our present pur- 
pose to remember that, as Professor George P. 
Marsh has said, Tyndale's translation of the New 
Testament has exerted " a more marked influence 
upon English philology than any other native work 
between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare.'' 
When, in due time, the Authorized Version came 
to be made, the translators seem to have exercised 
the greatest care in their choice of words. While 
many which they placed in the margin have become 
obsolete or provincial, very few such are to be found 
in the text itself. No doubt our English Bible has 
retained words in common use which might other- 
wise have been dropped ; but to the taste of the 
translators is to be ascribed the fact that the lan- 
guage of the version made in the first years of the 
seventeenth century is so largely the language of 
our homes in the closing years of the nineteenth. 
Nor is the popular suspicion of change, which has 
been so abundantly shown in the case of the Re- 
vised Version, without a parallel in the history of 
the version which it revised. So sound a judge 
as John Selden complained of its un-English 
phrases. "Well enough," says he, "as long as 
scholars have to do with it ; but when it comes 
among the common people, Ivord, what gear do 
they make of it." ^ It would seem as much from 

1 Edgar, pp. 293, 328. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 181 

the earlier, as from later experiences through 
which versions of the Bible have passed, that 
the people themselves may be safely trusted to 
maintain the integrity of their richest national 
heirloom. 

2. From the influence of the English Bible upon 
the history of the language, it is natural for us to 
pass to the influence which the book has exerted 
upon its character. What we are accustomed to 
term the biblical style, finds its fullest expression 
in the Authorized Version. But what is that ver- 
sion ? The group of scholars who compiled it 
drew their vocabulary as they drew their transla- 
tion, from all sources. If they had near at hand, 
while they worked the Great Bible and the 
Bishops' Bible, with which they would have the 
largest ecclesiastical sympathies, not less but 
rather more did they turn to the Bible of the 
Protestant exiles in Geneva, and of the Romanist 
recusants at Rheims. The Vulgate, on which 
WyclifFe had relied so largely, was in their coun- 
sels ; and in using as they did the Bible of Thomas 
Matthew, they really pressed into the service the 
great names of Tyndale and Coverdale. Indeed, 
Tyndale's Version, it has been truly said, "is the 
parent of the authorized, as he himself is the true 
hero of the English Reformation. " ^ Bishop West- 
cott has computed that nine-tenths of the Author- 

1 Angus, pp. 45, 46. 



182 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

ized Version of i John, and five-sixths of the 
Ephesians are retained from Tyndale. The poor 
refugee, denied alike a home and a grave in his 
native land, influences our literature to-day more 
powerfully than any other one man, and is likely 
to continue to do so until the Bible of our child- 
hood ceases to be read. To quote Mr. Froude : 
"The peculiar genius which breathes through it, 
the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon 
simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, une- 
qualled, unapproached in the attempted improve- 
ments of modern scholars — all are here, and bear 
the impress of one man, and that man William 
Tyndale."^ 

So free and natural is the translation in the 
Authorized Version, that we almost forget that it 
is a translation ; and in truth, "it is not simply a 
translation, but a living reproduction of the origi- 
nal Scriptures in idiomatic English. It reads like 
an original work, such as the prophets and apos- 
tles might have written in the seventeenth cen- 
tury for English readers. It reveals an easy 
mastery of the rich resources of the English lan- 
guage, and blends with singular felicity, Saxon 
force and Latin melody."^ This is itself evi- 
dence of the highest art. So thoroughly is the 
rendering naturalized among us, that we have 

1 Froude's " History of England," Vol. Ill, p. 84. 

2 Roberts " Companion," etc., p. 89. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATUEE. 183 

come to think that the effort of the translators 
could not have been so great after all. The very- 
words of the original must have lent themselves 
at once to translation. It is well for us to remem- 
ber the protest of Cardinal Newman : ' ' Scripture 
easy of translation ? Then, why have there been 
so few good translators ? Why is it that there has 
been such great difficulty in combining the two 
necessary qualities — fidelity to the original and 
purity in the adopted vernacular ? Why is it that 
the authorized versions of the church are often so 
inferior to the original as compositions, except 
that the church is bound, above all things, to see 
that the version is doctrinally correct, and in a 
difficult problem, is obliged to put up with de- 
fects in what is of secondary importance, provided 
she secure what is of first ? And, then, Scripture 
not elaborate ! Scripture not ornamented in dic- 
tion and musical in cadence ! Why, consider the 
Epistle to the Hebrews ! Where is there in the 
classics any composition more carefully, more artis- 
tically written ? Consider the book of Job ; is it 
not a sacred drama, as artistic, as perfect, as any 
great tragedy of Sophocles or Euripides? Con- 
sider the Psalter ; are there no ornaments, no 
rhythm, no studied cadences, no responsive mem- 
bers in that divinely beautiful book " ^ 

Why should we hesitate to say that in the 

1 Newman, John Henry, " Idea of a University," pp. 288, 289. 



184 THE HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

choice of language for his translation, Tyndale 
had help from on high ? He had given up his life 
to his work ; for the love he bore this word of God, 
he had consented to be exiled, persecuted, im- 
prisoned ; he was a man of prayer, and spent his 
hours in close communion with his L^rd. The 
vocabulary of such a man seems almost sacred. 
What is certain is, that Tyndale's words are 
largely the words of our version to-day, and his 
spirit breathes through the whole. ' ' He felt, ' ' 
says Bishop Westcott, " by a happy instinct, the 
potential affinity between Hebrew and English 
idioms, and enriched our language and thought 
forever with the characteristics of the Semitic 
mind. " ^ If to the mingled blood in the veins of 
the English people we attribute in such a large 
measure the national greatness, equally does the 
English Bible owe to the various hands that labored 
on its vocabulary the happy blending of con- 
trasted elements which makes it such a noble 
model of style. We are told that it is worth while 
to master Spanish, so as to be able to read Cer- 
vantes, and Italian for the sake of Dante. How 
much are we to be envied, who are accustomed 
from our cradles to the tongue into which our 
Bible is rendered ! We need not go the length 
of the poet Swinburne, who considers that the 
New Testament gained, beyond all power of 

1 Wescott, p. 211 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 185 

expression, in being translated out of the orig- 
inal Greek " into divine Bnglisli," in order to 
appreciate the advantage to the people at large of 
this matchless version. But we are bound to do 
full justice to the fact that there can be no writer 
of any eminence who has entirely escaped its 
influence. Those unconscious years in which we 
gather our vocabulary, and store up the words 
which through all after life stay with us, have 
been in England and America for more than ten 
centuries and a half, familiar with this great mas- 
terpiece of English prose. A comparison of our 
literature from John Bunyan to John Ruskin with 
the literature of France in a like period, would be 
sufficient to show that we owe more than we can 
ever tell to our early training in the English of 
the Bible. The character of our national tongue 
has been tempered by it ; and to it our great 
writers are largely indebted for the sobriety, the 
strength, and the sweetness which distinguish 
their best efforts. 

3. This leads us to consider more in detail, the 
influence of the English Bible on the literature 
of our language. The subject is very extensive, 
but we must find space for some illustrations of 
this influence, both direct and indirect. The stu- 
dent of Shakespeare will be impressed with the 
extent to which his dramas are permeated with 
the very phraseolog}^ of Scripture. Evidently 



186 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

before the Authorized Version was made, the 
Bible was a household word in England. The 
hospitable memory of the poet must have borne 
away from his early home in Stratford-on-Avon, 
great portions of Scripture. Bishop Wordsworth 
considers that we may " put together our best 
authors who have written upon subjects not pro- 
fessedly religious or theological, and we shall not 
find in them all united so much evidence of the 
Bible having been read and used as we have 
found in Shakespeare alone. ' ' ^ Often he quotes 
closely the words of the Bible, as where Hum- 
phrey, Duke of Gloster, cries : 

Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief. 
Ah ! Humphrey, this dishonor in thine age, 
Will bring thy head with sorrow to the ground ; 

or when Benedick is praised in that 

From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, 

he is all mirth. With the characters of the 
Bible he is familiar. Satan and Pharaoh and 
Samson and Solomon and David and Herod 
and Pilate and Paul are not names only in his 
ears, but he understands their natures and their 
doings as well as he understands the kings, the 
warriors, the heroes, and the heroines whom he 
marshalls on his stage. His commendation of his 

1 " Shakespeare and the Bible," p. 345. To this book I am in- 
debted for many of the references on this subject. 



TflE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 187 

soul to his Saviour in his last will is, we dare 
believe, more than a mere legal form, and shows 
him as in spirit a follower of 

. . . Those blessed feet, 
Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross. 

No doubt Shakespeare had to the full the 
faculty of merging his own distinctive individuality 
in that of his characters. Of him personally we 
know little. But the strong religious sentiments 
which he puts into the mouths of others must have 
come in the great majority of instances from his 
own heart, and must express his own convictions. 
As such, these sentiments possess a peculiar in- 
terest. They throw a valuable light upon that 
many-minded nature which was content to be seen 
by all time in any guise rather than its own. And 
they are of even greater importance if we think of 
them as the sentiments of multitudes of English- 
men at that time. The work of Wycliffe and his 
simple preachers, of Tyndale and Coverdale and 
Cranmer, had not been lost. The country was 
now in the hold of the Bible. We turn then to 
the dramas of Shakespeare as the most powerful 
expression of popular English religious thought 
— the thought of the yeoman, the merchant, the 
artisan. 

The Genevan theologian could not have put 
more strongly the doctrine of the Divine sov- 



188 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

reignty and a particular providence. We recall 
at once the famous lines in " Hamlet '' : 

There's a Divinity that shapes ovir ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will. 

But not less clear is Queen Katharine's faith : 

Heaven is above all yet : there sits a Judge 
That no king can corrupt. 

The words of Scripture, and equally the comfort- 
ing truth which they express, are heard in " Ham- 
let " again : 

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. 

Surely the poet himself speaks in that impres- 
sive utterance of pious Henry VI. : 

O Thou, that judgest all things, stay my thoughts 
If my suspect be false, forgive me, God : 
For judgment only doth belong to Thee. 

The speech of Portia is an English classic, but 
it puts as truly as any preacher could that love 
which redeemed the world : 

Mercy is above this scepter'd sway; 
It is enthroned in the heart of kings ; 
It is an attribute of God himself ; 
And earthly power doth then show likest God's 
When mercy seasons justice. 

The very words of Paul to the Bphesians (Bph. 
I : 7) must have been in the poet's mind when he 
makes Clarence in the Tower speak of: 

Redemption 
Through Christ's dear blood, shed for our grievous sin. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 189 

And the lines in the ^ ' Two Gentlemen of 
Verona," 

Who by repentance is not satisfied 

Is not of heaven nor earth ; for these are pleased, 

sound like the refrain of the parable of the Prodi- 
gal Son. 

When Tennyson sings : 

And ah ! for a man to rise in me 
That the man I am may cease to be, 

he has been anticipated by Shakespeare : 

Strange it is 
That nature must compel us to lament 
Oiir most persisted deeds ; 

and both of them no doubt recalled PauPs pas- 
sionate cry : "O wretched man that I am! who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death ! " 
(Rom. 7 : 24). 

It is not hard to believe that the sublime lament 
of Job, " I go whence I shall not return, even to 
the land of darkness and the shadow of death " 
(Job 10 : 21), inspired the masterly suggestion of 

The undiscovered country from whose bourn 
No traveler returns ; 

and that his remembrance of Bcclesiastes (ch. 
12 : 7) dictated to the dramatist the last words of 
King Richard II. : 

Mount, mount my soul ! thy seat is up on high ; 
While my gross flesh sinks downward here to die. 



190 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

The devout life must have had a true meaning 
to the man who could write : 

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man 
As modest stillness and humility ; 

and it must have drawn its impulse from the very 
teachings of Him who was meek and lowly in 
spirit, teachings which are heard with no uncer- 
tain sound in many of the lines which make the 
poet's utterances familiar in our mouths as house- 
hold words. Time forbids our enlarging upon 
Shakespeare's use of Scripture ; but perhaps 
enough has been said to show to what an extent 
the language and the thought of the greatest 
masterpieces of literature in our tongue are in- 
debted to the English Bible. 

From the dramatist we may turn to the roman- 
cist. The British novel cannot be studied apart 
from the influence which the Bible has had upon 
it. The name of Walter Scott will occur at once.. 
His intimacy with the very words of Scripture 
dated from his childhood, and found an illustra- 
tion when, only a boy at the high school of Edin- 
burgh, he ventured to assert that the word with 
is in one place used as a noun and not as a preposi- 
tion, quoting correctly the verse from Judges, " And 
Samson said unto Delilah, If they bind me with 
seven green withs that were never dried, then 
shall I be weak, and be as another man ' ' ( Judg. 
i6 : 7). And it continued until the very end, 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 191 

when he called for the Bible to be read to him as 
the one book for that solemn hour, and found 
comfort where so many others have found and 
will find it in the fourteenth chapter of the Gk)spel 
of John. 

To Scott there was perpetual music in the na- 
tional Psalm book ; his ear delighted in the mag- 
nificent imagery of the prophets ; he was familiar 
not only with the heroes of the Bible, but with its 
less-known characters : his stories — "Waverly," 
"Old Mortality," ''The Bride of lyammermoor," 
^'Ivanhoe," illustrated great religious truths; 
every reference to the sacred pages was caught up 
and cherished by a Bible-loving people ; and, while 
his range of choice passed through all the books 
from Genesis to Revelation, he used most and to the 
highest purpose the words and scenes of the Evan- 
gelists.^ Hundreds, and probably thousands of 
verses from the Bible could be rescued from his 
romances, and the indirect allusions which take for 
granted an acquaintance with the Scriptures on 
the part of his readers are more numerous far. 
The same appreciation of the Bible has marked 
later writers of fiction. When Walter Savage 
lyandor, praising Charles Dickens' style, asks him 
where he got it, the novelist replied instantly : 
"Why, from the New Testament, to be sure." 

1 See "The Bible in Waverly," by Nicholas Dickson, Edinburgh, 
1884. 



192 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

An over-sensitive reader of his last and unfinished 
story ventured to remonstrate with him on what 
seemed to be a lack of reverence in a Scripture 
quotation. Dickens answered : " I have always 
striven in my writing to express veneration for the 
life and lessons of our Saviour, because I feel it ; 
and I rewrote that history for my children — every 
one of whom knew it from hearing it repeated to 
them long before they could read, and almost as 
soon as they could speak." His readers will re- 
member with what wonderful skill he wrought 
the words of Scripture into his own somewhat 
artificial rhetoric, as though he felt sufficiently 
mistrustful of himself to welcome the aid of the 
established standard of English style. But in the 
crowning scene of " The Tale of Two Cities " — the 
work in which he touched his very highest point — 
it was a still nobler impulse, one thinks, which 
prompted his choice of a text. The castaway, 
Sydney Carton, by his voluntary death, better 
than any other character in English fiction, illus- 
trates the Master's word, "Greater love hath no 
man than this, that a man lay down his life for 
his friends " (John 15 : 13). He is upon the scaf- 
fold, in the wild days of the French Revolution. 
A poor little seamstress, innocent as he, and to 
him, until that tragic meeting, a stranger, is to 
die also ; but in that hour she remembers a cousin 
of hers in the sweet far-away country, ignorant of 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 193 

the dreadful doom by which she is now to perish, 
and in her simplicity she turns to Sydney, for 
light on the one question which perplexes her. 
" ' Do you think,' " and the uncomplaining eyes in 
which there is so much endurance fill with tears, 
and the lips part a little more and tremble, ' ' ' that 
it will seem long to me while I wait for her in the 
better land where I trust both you and I will be 
mercifully sheltered.' 

" ' It cannot be, my child ; there is no Time 
there, and no trouble there.' 

' ' ' You comfort me so much ! I am so igno- 
rant. Am I to kiss you now ? Is the moment 
come ? ' 

"^Yes.' 

'* She kisses his lips ; he kisses hers ; they sol- 
emnly bless each other. The spare hand does 
not tremble as he releases it ; nothing worse than 
a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. 
She goes next before him — is gone. 

" ' I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the 
lyord ; he that believeth in me, though he were 
dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and 
believeth in me, shall never die. ' 

' ' The murmuring of many voices, the upturning 
of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in 
the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells for- 
ward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all 
flashes away." 

N 



194 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH. BIBLE. 

With his more natural style, Thackeray made 
even a better use of the English Bible than did 
Dickens. His best known romance owed its title 
to Bunyan, and found its points of view in Bccle- 
siastes. There is no more pathetic chapter in 
' ' Vanity Fair ' ' than that in which the widowed 
mother, driven by poverty, prepares to give up 
her boy to his ungenial grandfather ; and it is in- 
spired from a chapter not less pathetic in the 
childhood of Samuel : ' ' That night Amelia made 
the boy read the story of Samuel to her, and how 
Hannah, his mother, having weaned him, brought 
him to Eli the high priest, to minister before the 
I^ord. And he read the song of gratitude which 
Hannah sang, and which says, 'Who it is who 
maketh poor and maketh rich, and bringeth low 
and exalteth — how the poor shall be raised up out 
of the dust, and how, in his own might, no man 
shall be strong.' Then he read how Samuel's 
mother made him a little coat, and brought it to 
him from year to year when she came up to offer 
the yearly sacrifice. And then, in her sweet, sim- 
ple way, George's mother made commentaries to 
the boy upon this affecting story. How Hannah, 
though she loved her son so much, yet gave him 
up because of her vow. And how she must al- 
ways have thought of him as she sat at home, far 
away, making the little coat ; and Samuel, she 
was sure, never forgot his mother ; and how happy 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITEEATURE. 195 

she must have been as the time came — ^and the 
years pass away very quickly— when she should 
see her boy, and how good and wise he had grown. 
This little sermon she spoke with a gentle, solemn 
voice, and dry eyes, until she came to the account 
of their meeting — then the discourse broke ofif 
suddenly, the tender heart overflowed, and taking 
the boy to her breast, she rocked him in her arms, 
and wept silently over him in a sainted agony of 
tears."' 

When the great novelist comes to draw the no- 
blest of all his characters. Colonel Newcome — and 
who has probably no superior in all the portrait 
gallery of English fiction — the spirit of Him who 
was " the first true gentleman that ever lived " is 
constantly apparent. Our step is quiet and our 
voice falls to a whisper, as we stand at his bed- 
side, when for him the last moment has come. 
" At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began 
to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the 
bed feebly beat time. And just as the last bell 
struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, 
and he lifted up his head a little and quickly said 
' Adsum, ' and fell back. It was the word we 
used at school when names were called ; and lo, he 
whose heart was as that of a little child, had an- 
swered to his name, and stood in the presence of 
the Master." 2 

1 "Vanity Fair." ^ «< fj^g Newcomes." 



196 THE HISTORY "OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Over the whole course of English poetry since 
the Elizabethan period, the Bible has exerted a 
marked and wholesome influence. If there are 
decidedly unscriptural elements in Milton's " Ode 
to the Nativity," if the theology of "Paradise 
L^st " is any different from the theology of the book 
from which it professed to get its inspiration, if 
imagination more than authority, dictated " Sam- 
son Agonistes," it cannot be denied that the mind 
of their author was most powerfully influenced by 
the Bible, and certainly the Psalms suggested the 
one fine hymn (written when he was fifteen years 
of age) which Milton has bequeathed to our 
collections : 

Let us with a gladsome mind 
Praise the Lord, for he is kind-. 

Joseph Addison is remembered to-day, not so 
much because he was the writer of limpid and 
graceful prose as because he was the singer of an- 
other of the few hymns for which our congrega- 
tions have to thank the English poets ; and that 
hymn is itself a paraphrase of the nineteenth 
Psalm.' 

But it is when we leave the age of rhetorical 
artifice, and breathe the purer air of natural senti- 
ment, that we imderstand how great the power of 
our Bible has been in the history of our poetry. 
Mr. Stopford A. Brooke does not exaggerate when 

1 "The Spacious Firmament on High," etc. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 197 

he claims Cowper as the poet who roused passion 
from its long slumber, and struck the first note of 
that personal poetry which was afterward carried 
so far in the " Prelude " of Wordsworth, the " Alas- 
tor" of Shelley, the " Childe Harold" of Byron; 
and he is no doubt correct when he says, " It was 
the great religious movement led by the Wesleys, 
joined afterward by the fiery force of Whitefield, 
which descended through Newton to the hymns 
and poetry of Cowper."^ That movement, we 
need scarcely add, was intensely biblical. It 
caught and carried on the inspiration of the day 
of Pentecost. It took its marching orders from the 
Great Commission itself. Cowper's best hymns 
are those which are the most biblical, as it was to 
the Bible that he owed the few clear skies which 
arched his clouded and melancholy course. Upon 
him, as well as upon most of our great poets since 
he struck the key-note of a simple and more natu- 
ral style, the direct influence of the Bible is very / 
apparent. The very words of Scripture are woven 
into their lines. It was Jeremiah who gave Byron 
the hint for his grand and gloomy sketch "Dark- 
ness" ; it was Job that suggested " Thanatopsis " 
to Bryant. But for Paul's great chapter on the 
resurrection of the dead, we should never have 
had Wordsworth's " Ode to Immortality." Ten- 
nyson was evidently a diligent student of the 

1 " Theology of the English Poets," pp. Il, 12. 



198 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Bible. He assured Dr. Samuel Cox that he held 
Job to be the greatest poem whether of ancient or 
modem times ;^ and with its most musical words he 
concludes the most popular of his earlier composi- 
tions, when the sick girl tells her mother that she 
hopes before long : 

To lie within the light of Grod, as I lie upon your breast — 
And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. 

What is still more interesting and equally to our 
purpose is the use which he more than once made 
of Peter's inspiring words: *'Whom having not 
seen, ye love ; in whom, though now ye see him 
not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable 
and full of glory " (i Peter i : 8). It is with these 
words in his mind that Tennyson opens the poem 
which, more than any other, expresses the deeper 
feeling of his century : 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
"Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone embrace, 

Believing, where we cannot prove ! 

and when the poem closes, some echo from the same 
mighty assurance seems to linger with him yet, as 
he reverts to ' ' That friend of mine who lives in 
God": 

That God, which ever lives and loves ; 

One God, one law, one element, 

And one far-oft' divine event. 
To which the whole creation moves. 

1 " Freeman," April 7, 1893. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATUKE. 199 

But we have done scant justice to the Bible in 
English literature when we have traced its direct 
influence alone. Quotations from our great writers 
couched in the precise words of Scripture it would 
be an easy matter to multiply ; and yet there would 
lie before us the unreaped field of richer promise 
from which we should need harvest in the scrip- 
tural allusions and references which, if less direct, 
are not less obvious. The Bible not only pushes 
itself up like the rock penetrating the surface, but 
like the rock again it tinges and fertilizes the soil 
which lies all about it. The childhood of our 
great writers, in the majority of instances, has 
been lived in an atmosphere familiar with the 
rhetoric of Scripture. As Dr. A. P. Peabody 
once said : " Our Bible is still the key to the best 
English diction ; and by conversance with it our 
children are made familiar with their own lan- 
guage in a purer form than any other which can 
be placed before them. ' ' ^ Who shall say how the 
public reading of this book has trained the people 
of England and America to a knowledge of mel- 
ody, and to a love for harmonious prose ? To this 
daily discipline, coupled with the enforced learn- 
ing of the fine old Scotch paraphrases, Mr. Ruskin 
says he owes the first cultivation of his ear in 
sound. The translators of our Authorized Version 
lived too near the melodious age in our literature 

1 " The Deathless Book," David O'Mears, D. D., p. 195. 



200 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

to dare offend this fine sense of harmony, and in 
many cases they introduced changes only for the 
sake of pleasant cadence in reading.^ More than 
this : To be conversant with the Bible is to be 
trained not alone to shrink from discordant ar- 
rangement of wordSj but also in the whole art of 
suitable expression. To this hour our Bible re- 
mains the best handbook of rhetoric. So Robert 
South could write with characteristic force and 
beauty : "Where do we find such rhetoric and 
poetry as in the Scripture, or such pathos as in the 
lyamentations of Jeremy ? One would think that 
every word was the noise of a breaking heart. So 
that he who said he would not read the Scriptures 
for fear of spoiling his style, showed himself as 
much a blockhead as an atheist"' Its influence 
upon a style originally deficient in the essentials 
of distinction has been illustrated within a few 
years in the experience of Mr. Stanley, the Afri- 
can explorer. Of him a competent writer asks : 
* ' Where did he get his present style ? ' ' and then 
proceeded to answer his own question, thus: "A 
clue may be found in his own story of the Bible 
which Sir William Mackinnon gave him at start- 
ing. He read it through, he tells us, three times. 
. . . He has read, I will venture to guess, the 
greater prophets of the Old Testament and the 
epistles in the New Testament, till his mind has 

1 Edgar, p. 305. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 201 

become saturated with them. There is no imita- 
tion of any of these writers, or no conscious imi- 
tation . . . But they have modified his habits of 
thought and his methods of expression. He has 
brooded over them in the recesses of his awful 
forest till they have become part of his spiritual 
and part of his intellectual life." ^ 

For furnishing the writer or the speaker with 
words suited to his purpose, there is no other book 
in the English language worthy to be named in 
the same breath with the Bible. As Milton says : 
*' There are no songs comparable to the songs of 
Zion, no orations equal to those of the prophets, 
and no politics like those the Scriptures teach." 
How much this is the case the history of oratory 
abundantly proves. Edmund Burke's habit was 
to read a chapter in Isaiah before going to speak 
in the House of Commons. "Isaiah," he says, 
"possessed both the blaze of eloquence and the 
light of truth. ' ' Daniel Webster was a constant 
student of the Bible, and his most impressive use 
of the 139th Psalm in one of his great cases will 
be quoted so long as his name is remembered. ' 'A 
sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent 
like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the win^s 
of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts 
of the sea, duty performed or duty violated, is still 
with us for our happiness or our misery. If we 

1 "New York Tribune," May 28, 1890. 



202 THE HISTORY OF THE EJsGLISH BIBLE. 

say, surely the darkness shall cover us^ in the 
darkness as in the light our obligations are yet 
with us. We cannot escape their power, nor fly 
from their presence. ' ' A few moments before he 
died, his mind went back to the brightest hour in 
all the history of our world, and he was heard to 
say : " Peace on earth and good will to inen — that 
is the happiness, the essence — good will toward 
'tnen, " 

The noblest English orator of our century, John 
Bright, knew his Bible well. He heard it as a 
child at home ; he took his first lessons from a 
Baptist minister, made some of his earliest ad- 
dresses in the Baptist chapel of his native tow^n, 
and more than once acknowledged that it was to 
a Baptist preacher he was indebted ' for the most 
useful hints he ever received on the art of public 
speaking. In his own family there was no book 
which he loved to read aloud more than the Bible,* 
and in his speeches there are abundant evidences 
of his familiarity with its language. On one 
memorable occasion he added a new figure to the 
phrase book of the House of Commons, when he 
said of an opponent : ' ' The right hon, gentleman 
has retired into what may be called his political 
cave of Adullam, and he has called about him 

Mr. Bright's favorite passages from the Bible included the Beati- 
tudes ; Eph. 6: 10-20; I Cor. 13; Exod. 20 : I-17 ; Eccl. ii : 
I-IO ; and Ps. 27. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 203 

every one that was in distress, and every one that 
was discontented." "An AduUamite, " from that 
hour to this, has been a political malcontent ; and 
a few days after, Mr. L/Owe, one of those included 
in Mr. Bright's invective, had to make the humil- 
iating confession, that he had been besieged with 
inquiries from members of the House anxious to 
hear where and what this " cave of Adullam " was. 
While enlightening their ignorance of Scripture 
at his own expense, he said he was reminded of 
the dying eagle when he discovered that the 
arrow with which his heart had been pierced 
was furnished with feathers taken from his own 
wing. 

It was probably for the sake of its clearness of 
language that the "book of Proverbs" attracted 
the special notice of Edward Everett, who made a 
constant study of it for rhetorical purposes. For 
nervous force quite as much as for clearness, the 
vocabulary of the Bible is remarkable. Listen to 
Sir Walter Raleigh : "I have considered, saith 
Solomon, all the works that are under the sun, 
and behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit ; 
but who believes it till Death tells it us? Oh 
eloquent, just, and mighty Death ; whom none 
could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none 
hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the 
world hath flattered, thou only hast cast -out of the 
world and despised ; thou hast drawn together all 



204 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, 
and ambition of men ; and covered it all over with 
these two narrow words, Hie Jacet. ' ' 

In our own century no two authors are more 
marked by literary strength than Carlyle and 
Ruskin. What Carlyle wrote to Ruskin about 
one of his books, "It is all written with the old 
nobleness and fire in which no other living voice 
to my knowledge equals yours," Ruskin might 
with equal truth have written to Carlyle. Both 
of them are biblical in their choice of words. 
Once while visiting at a country house, Carlyle 
was requested to conduct family worship, and it 
is said, that having begun reading the book of 
Job he read it right through to the end. " One 
of the grandest things," he says of it, "ever writ- 
ten with a pen. ' ' Toward the close of his life he 
sat waiting for tea one evening, with a Bible in 
his hand, and was heard repeating to himself the 
hymn dear no doubt from its early associations : 

The hour of my departure comes, 
I hear the voice that calls me home ; 
At last O Lord, let trouble cease, 
And let thy servant die in peace. 

Then, all unconscious that he was observed, he 
buried himself once more in the pages of that same 
book of Job, of which he had once said: "Sub- 
lime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest choral 
melody as of the heart of mankind — so soft and. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 205 

great, as the summer midnight, as the world with 
its seas and stars. ' ' And about how much besides 
the book of Job is it true that the soft and the 
great mingle in the vocabulary of Scripture. 
Benjamin Franklin read Habakkuk to a literary 
circle in Paris, winning the unanimous tribute of 
admiration for an author of whom not one of them 
had ever heard before ; and Samuel Johnson, in a 
London club, introduced his friends to a pastoral 
which he said he had lately met with, and which 
they imagined had only just been composed ; and 
when they were all loud in their praises of its 
simple and pathetic beauty he informed them that 
it was only the story of Ruth which he had read 
them from a book called the Bible, that they all 
affected to despise. John Bright's happy use of 
another Scripture idyl has now taken its place 
among the immortal passages in our English 
prose. It was when explaining why he, a simple 
Friend, had accepted office in the British Govern- 
ment that he said : "There is a passage in the 
Old Testament which has often struck me as being 
one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect 
that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was 
very hospitably entertained by one termed in 
the Bible a Shunammite woman. In return for 
her hospitality he wished to make her some 
amends, and he called her to him and asked her 
what there was he should do for her. Shall I 



206 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Speak for thee to the king^ he said, or to the cap- 
tain of the host ? Now it has always appeared to 
me that the Shunammite woman returned a great 
answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's 
offer, / dwell among 7nine own people. When the 
question was put to me whether I would step into 
the position in which I now find myself, the an- 
swer from my heart was the same — I wish to dwell 
among mine own people. ' ' 

The clearness and vigor of our English Bible are 
not more remarkable than its beauty and delicacy. 
It has been repeatedly noticed about John Bunyan, 
that rude by birth and nurture, living a wild and 
profligate life for many years and writing in an 
age of unparalleled literary licentiousness, there is 
not a line in all his works which the most refined 
taste of to-day could wish to see blotted out. 
Doubtless the explanation may be found in the 
fact that it was in the Bible that Bunyan found 
his masculine melodious prose, and as Coleridge 
has truly said, intense study of that one book will 
keep any writer from being vulgar. In humble 
homes, under unkindly circumstances, among 
rough and ignoble and emphatically common- 
place associations, the Bible is like the prison 
flower — persistent in its blossoming, or the hymns 
with which Paul and Silas challenged the shame 
of the inner dungeon and the suffering of the 
stocks. There was an instinctive sense of the fitness 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 207 

of things in the old lady in Edinburgh of whom 
Sir Walter Scott tells us, that although she had 
fallen into poor circumstances, and was forced to 
live in a room on the highest stairs of Covenant 
Close, she never read her chapter except out of a 
Cambridge Bible, printed in the best style of the 
art and bound in embroidered velvet. 

4. I^anguage, however, is first and foremost a 
vehicle for thought. The greatness of literary art 
no doubt depends, as Mr. Walter Pater affirms, 
' ' on the quality of the matter it informs or con- 
trols." Our subject would be very incomplete 
were we to say nothing about the influence of our 
English Bible upon the intellectual vigor and rich- 
ness of the language. What Mr. Froude observes 
as to Tyndale, in his eloquent eulogy on him, is 
true of the book which to so large an extent still 
bears his impress : '' His spirit, as it were divorced 
from the world, moved in a purer element than 
common air." Very noticeable is the absence of 
all affectation or self-consciousness in its style. 
The aim of the translators is simply to convey 
their message, and in no single instance do they 
turn aside to call attention to themselves. What 
may be called Bible periods in history have been 
periods of intellectual renaissance. Thought has 
never been fresher than then. The fall of Con- 
stantinople in 1453 sent cultuie westward, an exile 
welcome to the quickened intellectual life of Italy, 



208 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

and it was then that with greater freedom of 
thought came a revived interest in the New Testa- 
ment. "Greece arose from the dead with the New 
Testament in her hand." ^ Of the Greek Testa- 
ment of Erasmus it has been said that " it contrib- 
uted more to the liberation of the human mind 
from the thralldom of the clergy than all the up- 
roar and rage of Luther's many pamphlets." Wy- 
cliffe was himself the foremost champion of free 
thought of his times in England. In other coun- 
tries the human intellect was claiming liberty to 
read in the vernacular that law of the Lord which 
made wise the simple, and it was claiming it not 
in vain. " We will not," shouted one sturdy Eng- 
lish speaker, " be the dregs of all, seeing other na- 
tions have the law of God, which is the law of our 
faith, written in their tongue." "Frenchmen, 
Belgians, and Normans," wrote Purvey in his pro- 
logue to the revised edition of Wyclifife's Bible, 
1388, "have the Bible . . . translated in here 
modir language : Why shulden hot Englishmen 
have the same in here modir language, I can not 
wite."^ When the full tide of the Protestant 
Reformation reached England, it brought with it 
the revival of learning, and as we have already 
remarked, our Authorized Version shone out on the 
firmament of letters at the very period when the 
sky was all ablaze with the splendor of great stars. 

1 " Our Bible," Canon Talbot, p. 59. 2 Edgar, p. 4. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 209 

No doubt there was both action and reaction. 
The period of intellectual quickening gave an im- 
pulse to the study of the Bible, while at the same 
time it received an impulse from it. But what 
especially concerns us, is to recognize that the 
Bible has never been driven into the background 
at such periods. It has taken its place in the 
van of every advance movement in the world of 
literature, from the fall of Constantinople until 
now. It has been the first to find and the earliest 
to welcome the light breeze which always springs 
up at the dawn. 

Not less remarkable has been the wide and 
generous range of thought which the English 
Bible has afiected. Lord Bacon stands at the 
head of an illustrious host of scientific men who 
have refused to divorce their favorite studies from 
the teachings of this book. Sir Isaac Newton 
interested himself in questions of prophecy ; Sir 
David Brewster claimed Scripture as his ally in his 
discussion with Whewell on the plurality of worlds, 
while his opponent had long before that time dis- 
tinguished himself in the field of natural the- 
ology ; Faraday, the leading chemist of his day, 
expounded the Bible every Sunday in the meeting 
house of an obscure sect ; in the presence of the 
same volume, his master, Sir Humphr)-^ Davy, a 
member of almost all the scientific institutions in 
the world, became as docile as a little child ; and 



210 THE HISTORY OF THE EJS'GLISH BIBLE. 

the genial Sedgwick, amid his fearless geological 
researches, kept pure and true the loyalty of his 
boyhood to the story of Genesis. 

The achievements of art, even more than 
the fairy tales of science, have been inseparably 
associated with the Bible. The Scriptorium in 
the monastery was often a veritable studio. 
Manuscript copies of the Gospels remain to this 
day rich in gem and gold, and gorgeous in their 
blazonry of bright colors ; and often the master- 
piece of the pious transcriber was a very miracle 
of beauty. In our own time, no picture has more 
powerfully affected English art than Holman 
Hunt's lovely figure of ' ' Christ the Light of the 
World." That picture, as the artist has lately 
told us, is the memorial of his own conversion. 
It was in the period of a spiritual struggle waged 
within a singularly sensitive nature, that this 
conception came to the young painter. ' ' Youth," 
he says, ' ' offered me bribes on both sides — plea- 
sures of the material or of the spiritual kind — and 
as I was weighing all, I came upon the text, 
* Behold, I stand at the door and knock.' . . The 
figure of Christ standing at the door haunted me, 
gradually coming in more clearly defined mean- 
ing, waiting in the night — ever night near the 
dawn ; with a light sheltered from chance of ex- 
tinction in a lantern ; with a crown on his head, 
bearing that also of thorns ; with body robed like 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 211 

a priest, but in a world with signs of neglect and 
blindness. You will say that it was an emotional 
conversion, but there were other influences outside 
of sentiment. . . Many times since that day, when 
the critics assailed it violently, I have been com- 
forted by hearing of persons in sickness who knew 
not the painter's name, and troubled themselves 
not at all about the manner of its production or 
the artistic question, speaking of the picture as 
one that had haunted them and given them hope 
— the hope that makes death have no terrors. It 
is not egotism that makes me pleased at this. I 
look to it as one of the testimonies — a very little 
one — of the greatness and the necessity of the 
creed it illustrates. . . From the little beginning of 
Abraham's leaving Padan-aram, the whole of the 
active-minded people of the world have been 
blessed with an inspiring religion, which has en- 
dowed Shakespeare and the poor in the hospital 
equally with noble and patient hope." 

In our literature, what book has been found 
comparable to the English Bible in stimulating 
thought ? When Hugh Miller, the Scottish stone- 
mason, destined to be the literary leader of the 
Disruption, comes to look back over his life, he 
remembers that what wakened his mind and made 
him conscious of thought, was the history of 
Joseph. And the truth in reference to one is also 
the truth in reference to multitudes. The Bible 



212 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

has stimulated tliouglit in whole communities, 
and it is doing so yet. Washington Irving is not 
singular in his experience when he says : "I 
think I have waked a good many sleeping fancies 
by the reading of a chapter in Isaiah " ; and Haw- 
thorne speaks on behalf of many besides himself 
when he confesses that the Bible and the " Pil- 
grim's Progress" are the main sources of his in- 
spiration. Indeed, could Job and David, Isaiah and 
Bzekiel, muster their literary children only, could 
the evangelists and Paul summon from our shelves 
the volumes which have sprung from their kind- 
ling words, we should find ourselves in the midst 
of a vast and radiant host. Spenser met his 
Red Cross Knight in the Bphesians. Milton's 
genius caught fire in the garden of Bden and on 
the Mountain of Temptation ; while to the larger 
hope of the Christian creed, Tennyson isjndebted 
for ' ' In Memoriam. ' ' The melodies of Byron and 
Moore, and the labored descriptive poems of 
Willis, draw their text from Bible incidents. It 
is difiicult to conceive of Cowper apart from the 
influence which the same book exerted over him. 
It stirred the tranquil nature of Wordsworth in 
his most heroic moments ; the early training in 
Bible text and teaching went far to make a theo- 
logian of Robert Browning ; while Bmerson and 
Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier, are children 
either of the manse or of the meeting-house. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 213 

Nor is it in stimulating thought alone that our 
English Bible has had so great power. Equally 
has it molded and controlled the thought which 
it has first aroused. It was the constant com- 
panion of Abraham Lincoln when he worked a 
bare-footed boy in the field, and there are passages 
in his last inaugural which sound as though he 
penned them just after rising from its pages. When 
John Bright said that he was willing to stake the 
divine origin of the whole Bible upon the ' ' Psal- 
ter," he had undoubtedly in his mind the won- 
derful influence which that book had exerted 
over his own impetuous and ardent nature. Henry 
M. Stanley says that the words, " Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," have 
become the guiding motto of his life. It is under 
the spell of Isaiah that Handel rises to unexpected 
grandeur, and his servant testifies that at the 
time when the great master was composing " The 
Messiah," he often saw his tears muigled with the 
ink. "I did think," Handel himself said in his 
broken English, ^'I did see all heaven before me, 
and the great God himself" When the Great 
Bible was printed its powerful influence was 
speedily recognized. It drove the impure litera- 
ture from the field as bats and owls — creatures of 
the night — fly before the sun. From that time to 
this, national morality has been gauged by na- 
tional appreciation of the Scriptures. We may 



214 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

reasonably believe that it was PauPs great words 
to the Philippians (Phil. 3 : 13), that taught 
Arthur Hugh Clough to sing : 

For still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope ; 
What here is faithfully begun 
Will be completed, not undone ; 

as it was certainly the words of the Apostle John 
(i John 2:1) that steadied the soul of Sir Walter 
Raleigh when, after wild and stormy experi- 
ences his days of pilgrimage drew to a close, and 
in the immediate prospect of the scaffold he could 
look beyond to the final court of decision : 

For there Christ is the King's attorney, 

Who pleads for all without degrees. 

And he hath angels, but no fees. 

And when the grand twelve-million jury 

Of our sins, with direful fury, 

'Gainst our souls black verdicts giv^e, 

Christ pleads his death, and then we live.i 

Indeed, when we remember how vast the in- 
fluence of this book has been ; how it has corrected 
error ; how it has controlled passion ; how it has 
molded thought ; how it has anticipated periods of 
intellectual awakening in the nation ; how it has 
bent over the cradle of genius ; how it has held 
with firm, yet gentle hands, the impetuous aspira- 
tion of fancy ; how it has enlarged the sphere of 

1 Sir Walter Raleigh. " My Pilgrimage." 1603. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 215 

science, until exact thought has touched the 
boundaries of speculation, and the philosopher has 
discovered himself to be a poet ; when we , re- 
member all this, it can scarcely excite in us any 
surprise that men have been tempted to oflfer to 
the book a homage which belongs of right only to 
its Author. Few famous sentences have been 
more often quoted, and few indeed quoted to 
worse purpose, than Chillingworth's memorable 
exclamation : ^' The Bible I say, the Bible only, 
is the religion of Protestants. ' ' ^ The historian of 
civilization, Henry Thomas Buckle, does not hesi- 
tate to credit the book in which these words occur, 
with having shaped the thought of the century in 
which it was uttered. But the spirit of liberality 
for which Chillingworth was so conspicuous, and 
the broad and philosophic character of his mind, 
should be for all times a sufficient corrective to 
any narrow and unworthy interpretation of his 
mem^orable words. In the face of Chillingworth's 
history, a convert to Rome and then returning 
with full personal conviction to the purer faith, 
it is not difficult to understand his meaning. As 
much as Wycliffe or Tyndale, he appeals against 
human authority ; and declares that the book in 
which God speaks to us directly, whether by the 
prophets of the Old Dispensation, or by his Son 
in the New, is to be the source of our light. 

1 Chillingworth's " Works," p. 481. 



216 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

" Christ, and Christ alone ; Christ the Son of God 
revealing the Father ; Christ, by the Holy Spirit, 
made real to the believer ; Christ, and Christ 
alone, is the religion of Protestantism." ^ 

The excursions which we have been making 
into the realms of literature, science, and art must 
now cease ; but only because our time bids us 
pause. The subject itself is almost boundless. 
Our survey should leave with us the persuasion 
that, while other things are soon forgotten, the 
Bible remains ; while other things grow old, this 
book carries in its heart the secret of perpetual 
youth. Every year, it has been said, buries its 
own literature. The book that lasts a decade is 
rare indeed, the book which outlives its century 
is unique. The masterpieces of our language can 
be placed on a very few shelves. But the English 
Bible seems to be superior to the ebb and flow of 
popular fancy and of critical opinion. It has 
been remarked that even those who with George 
Eliot abandon their early faith gO' on reading the 
Scriptures for the sake of their intellectual charm. 
Few things are more pathetic in her journal than the 
half apology with which the author of "Romola " 
confesses to purchasing a large print Bible in her 
old age, and finding comfort from its pages. 

There is an element of permanence even in the 
language of the Bible. Its vocabulary is colloquial 

"~ 1 R. H. Horton, D. D. 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 217 

without being familiar, and dignified without being 
stilted. No version in any language seems to have 
found its way to the national heart so completely as 
that for which we are indebted to the reign of 
James I. lyater attempts at revision have some- 
times commended themselves to the judgment of the 
scholar, but scarcely to the affection of the people 
at large. Among the curiosities of literature one 
comes now and again upon the experiments which 
those who rush in where angels fear to tread have 
made, by way of modernizing the Authorized Ver- 
sion, and they do little more than open to us a 
new and more humiliating conception of the folly 
of human nature. It perplexes us to understand 
how so sensible a man as Benjamin Franklin 
should have made an attempt to paint the lily and 
gild refined gold ; but unfortunately for his fame 
the attempt itself remains to-day. The man who 
in early life did not hesitate to compose a new 
version of the Lord's Prayer was equal in his riper 
years to paraphrasing Job ; and in sober earnest he 
suggested this as an improvement upon the open- 
ing scene of that sublime book : ' ' And it being 
levee day in heaven, all God's nobility came to 
court to present themselves before him ; and Satan 
also appeared in the circle as one of the ministry. 
And God said unto Satan : You have been some 
time absent ; where were you? And Satan an- 
swered : I have been at my country-seat and in 



218 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

different places visiting my friends." Not the 
admirers of Benjamin Franklin, but rather his 
bitterest foes, might wish that his name should de- 
scend to posterity linked to such puerile trifling as 
this. And meanwhile we say with Robert Brown- 
ing: 

I prefer, if you please, for my expounder 

Of the laws of the feast, the feast's own founder. 

After what has been said as to the influence of 
the English Bible, we cannot stop with the assur- 
ance of its permanence as a standard of good liter- 
ary form. It endures not for this reason alone or 
chiefly, but rather because, as no other book does, 
it brings to us the bread which never perishes, and 
the water which springs up to everlasting life. In 
a noble passage which may be quoted in part, be- 
cause it illustrates his happy use of Scripture, but 
in the main because it is so supremely true of the 
Bible, Mr. Ruskin has insisted that literature 
does its duty '' in raising our fancy to the height 
of what may be noble, honest, and felicitous 
in actual life, in giving us, though we may our- 
selves be poor and unknown, the companionship 
of the wisest spirits of every age and country, and 
in aiding the communication of clear thoughts and 
faithful purposes among distant nations, which 
will at last breathe calm upon the sea of lawless 
passion, and change into such halcyon days the 
winter of the world, that the birds of the air may 



THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 219 

have their nests in peace and the Son of Man 
where to lay his head. " 

If such is the province of literature in general, 
the testimony of full six hundred years proves 
that it is to an unequalled extent the province 
of this the greatest masterpiece in our tongue. 
And who shall venture to measure its influence 
on the future ? As far back as the days of Je- 
rome, a congregation bitterly resented a very slight 
change in the version of the book of Jonah with 
which they were familiar, and was only quieted 
when the old reading had been restored. ' ' They 
would not tolerate, ' ' wrote Augustine to Jerome, 
"a change in an expression which had been fixed 
by time in the feelings and memory of all, and had 
been repeated through so many ages in succes- 
sion."^ Our own Bible every year fastens itself 
more firmly in the love of the whole English 
speaking family. A Hindu gentleman of fine 
culture not many years ago drew the attention of 
his countrymen to the potent influence of the 
English language in developing the Hindu mind 
in the present day, and to the intimate connection 
which existed between that language and the 
Authorized Version of the English Bible. He 
held it to be no exaggeration to affirm that its 
pages had inspired all that was soft and gentle, 
good and noble about the English nation, "nay, 

^ 1 Talbot, pp. 85, 86. 



220 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

the solid virtues which had helped that great na- 
tion," as he said, *' in its unexampled advance in 
civilization and progress had been inspired and 
strengthened by this great book." ^ 

The future of the book is, it would seem, the 
future of the language. If Shakespeare, and 
Milton, and Bunyan are to endure as long as 
our tongue endures, then more confidently still 
may this be predicted of the Bible. How much 
such an assertion means it would be hard for 
us at present to say. Borne upon the crest of 
this swelling tide, our English Bible will share 
an earthly immortality to which more largely than 
any other one work in our language it has itself 
contributed. Words which were only the extrav- 
agance of flattery when spoken of Egypt's dusky 
queen, are words of truth and soberness when used 
about this book : 

Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale 
Its infinite variety. 

To it alone will ultimately belong the magnifi- 
cent eulogy of Daniel Webster upon the victori- 
ous power, * ' whose morning drumbeat following 
the sun, and keeping company with the hours, 
circles the earth with one continuous and un- 
broken strain." 

1 " Times of India." August 25, 1805. 



XI. 
IN THE NATION, 



" I am interested in the people who made the Bible, 
but I am more interested in the people whom the Bible 
makes, for they show me the fibre and genius of Scripture ' 
as no mental studiousness, or verbal exegesis can do." — - 
Dr. C. H. Parkhurst. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE BIBLK AND THE NATION. 

So perfect is the form in which the message of 
God has come to us in our English Bible that we 
are sometimes tempted to speak of that form as 
though it were in itself of prime importance. 
We need remember that, while we can no longer 
separate the truths of Scripture from the lan- 
guage with which for now nearly three centuries 
they have been associated, yet the authority of 
the Bible dwells not in the language, but in the 
truths. As Wordsworth insisted, forms must be 
the incarnation of thought. The thought of the 
Scriptures might have been couched in other and 
inferior language, but it would still have proved 
itself quick and powerful. In common with other 
nations, the English and the American people have 
needed some external law by which to be guided. 
Without that the Briton would never have risen 
to an independent existence when the Roman 
left his shores ; and the immigrant landing in this 
New World might have succumbed before the 
perils and hardships which, for many years, made 
his life so trying. The Bible has furnished this 
external authority, and the true grandeur of these 

223 



224 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

two nations may be traced to the weight which it 
has from the beginning carried with it. 

I. We glance in the first place at the civilizing 
influence which the Bible has exerted. In his 
day there was no single man who did so much to 
humanize the savage lives led by the Northum- 
brians as Bede, and it is equally true to affirm that 
no single man is more indissolubly associated than 
he with the work of teaching the truths of Script- 
ures and translating them into the vernacular of 
the people about him. In the ninth century, 
Alfred impressed himself upon his countrymen, 
not alone because of his splendid services in war 
and peace, nor chiefly because of his noble char- 
acter, but because he was the victorious cham- 
pion of Christianity against pagauism. ' ' Alfred 
was a Christian hero, and in his Christianity he 
found the force which bore him through calam- 
ity apparently hopeless, to victory and happi- 
ness." ^ A life of such tremendous activity as 
his aflbrded neither time nor taste for speculative 
studies. If he learned L/atin, it was to popularize 
its literature with his people. If he translated 
Boethius, it was to occupy their mind and his 
own with themes worthy of a nation's most seri- 
ous thought. If he founded schools, it was with 
the ambition that free-born English boys should 
read, with some measure, at least, of ease and accu- 

1 ♦* Lectures and Essays," Prof. Goldwin Smith, p. 271. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 226 

racy, the Scriptures in their mother tongue. If he 
collected and gave his sanction to a code of laws, 
he refused to separate it from the Decalogue. To 
him chiefly the growth and prosperity of the 
Saxon people are due, and it must never be for- 
gotten that when the Norman landed at Hast- 
ings it was to find a nation in many respects in 
advance of his own. On the banks of the Seine the 
Norman left no triumph of architecture superior 
to the Abbey of Westminster, then fresh from the 
builders' hands. He brought with him no better 
priests than those already in possession of the 
churches, where they read the Scriptures every 
Sunday in English, and in the same tongue 
preached their sermons. For a time it was inevi- 
table that civilization should be checked by the 
Norman conquest. There was little national liberty. 
There was no royal encouragement given to learn- 
ing. And it is no more than probable that the 
translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular, 
with which we now associate the name of Wy- 
cliffe, might have been made three hundred years 
before he was born if Harold, rather than William, 
had remained master of the field when the two 
armies met at Hastings, in that fight which changed 
the whole future of the English people. It took a 
long time for the old language to recover its hold ; 
and when, with Norman elements added indeed, 
it regained the ascendency, England was ready 



226 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

for the Bible of Wycliffe ; and with that came 
also a new era — an era of purer manners and juster 
laws. 

What happened at that time in the nation at 
large has often happened in the communities of 
which it is composed. There is a power in the 
Bible to civilize which has found frequent illus- 
trations on both sides of the Atlantic. Once let 
it obtain entrance into any society, and its influ- 
ence is equivalent to one of those fine acts of 
which George Bliot says, that they "produce a 
regenerative shudder through the frame, and make 
us ready to begin a new life.'' Methodism in 
Cornwall, when Wesley preached there, found 
that county brutal and dissolute ; but substituting 
for the feeble platitudes of the parish church the 
word of the L<ord, it lifted the population up, and 
to this hour it is the phraseology of the Bible 
which is familiar on the lips of the people in 
the extreme west of England. The same holds 
in New England, where lives trained up in the 
teaching of Scripture produced a love of law, a 
taste for ennobling pursuits, and a sweetness and 
simplicity of spirit, which made the society in her 
villages fifty years ago equal to any in Christen- 
dom. 

2. But the Bible has done more than civilize and 
refine. It has also proved itself a mighty progres- 
sive influence in national life. In the quicken- 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 227 

ing of that life it has played a great part. No one 
can say, for example, how the boys and girls, 
going to school or coming from it, who for seven 
hundred years have passed before the magnificent 
west front of Wells Cathedral, have been molded 
and inspired by its sculptures. The Bible in stone 
is there. Angels and saints and prophets, scenes 
from Scripture history, the solemnities of the last 
judgment, the hope of the resurrection and its 
despair, must have brought multitudes of men 
and women into the companionship of biography, 
history, and theology, and that at a time when 
books were rare and preaching powerless. The 
people never lost touch of the truth, and so it is 
not remarkable that alike, the popular uprisings in 
favor of liberty and the popular demands for 
ecclesiastical reform in the fourteenth century, 
were led by men versed in the Bible. "As sure 
as God's word is true," said "the good Lord Cob- 
ham," in the presence of his king, "the pope is 
the great antichrist foretold in Holy Writ." For 
this conviction he was ready to die ; and as heretic 
and traitor, although in truth one of the saints and 
patriots of those troubled times, he was hung in 
chains and then burned in I/)n- 

A Ty- • ^ ^TTT ^^^- A. D. 1417. 

don. His manuscript copy of Wy- 
cliflfe's Gospels is one of the choicest treasures now 
preserved in the Baptist College at Bristol. The 
revolting peasants in the reign of Richard II., 



228 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

marched to the preaching of John Ball, '' the mad 
priest of Kent," from whom, says Green, England 
*' first listened to a declaration of the national 
equality and rights of men. ' ' The rude jingles of 
ploughmen and mechanics catch their true note 
from the teachings of Christ. "Jack Miller 
asketh help to turn his mill aright. He hath 
grounden small, small : the King's Son of Heaven 
he shall pay for all." Wycliflfe, by his treatises, 
had stirred the heart of the people. Society, he 
insisted, was still under the control of God. His 
"simple priests" had brought the teachings of 
Scripture and its very words into numbers of coun- 
try parishes, where " falseness and guile " as the 
people came to see, " had reigned too long." How. 
powerful and how practical was this preaching of 
Wycliffe's itinerants, the rhymes of the peasantry 
testify : ' ' Now right and might, will and skill, 
God speed every dele" ; "Help truth, and truth 
shall help you. ' ' A recent biographer of the poet 
Chaucer, who himself had little sympathy with 
the new movement, says with truth : ' ' The con- 
nection between Wycliffe's teaching and the peas- 
ants' insurrection under Richard II. , is as undeni- 
able as that between IvUther's doctrines and the 
great social uprising in Germany, a century and a 
half afterward. " ^ As it circulated among the 
people, his Bible was a civil almost as much as it 

1 A. W. Ward, "Chaucer," p. i6. 




■^i^'»^^C 



Lutterworth Ciiui'Ch m 138-1 
Page 228. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 229 

was a religious power. It roused men to struggle 
for the life that now is as well as for that which is 
to come. Amid pestilence, famine, and bloodshed 
the Psalter spoke comfort to innumerable Bnglish 
hearts, and on its words the sorrows and hopes of 
troubled souls went up to heaven in the dark hours 
preceding the dawn. 

When the day broke at last, the Bible was given 
due honor. It is supposed that it was first used 
in national pageantry at the coronation of young 
Kdward VI. "When three swords were brought," 
writes Strype, the historian, " signs of his being 
king of three kingdoms, he said there was one 
wanting. And when the nobles about him asked 
him what that was, he answered the Bible. ' That 
book,' added he, ' is the sword of the Spirit, and to 
be preferred before these swords. ' And when the 
pious young king had said this, he commanded 
the Bible with the greatest reverence to be 
brought and carried before him."^ If this really 
happened, there was something prophetic in Ed- 
ward's demand, for as Carlyle says : " The period 
of the Reformation was a judgment day for 
Europe, when all the nations were presented with 
an open Bible, and all the emancipation of heart 
and intellect which an open Bible involves. Bug- 
land, North Germany, and other powers, accepted 
the boon, and they have been steadily growing in 

1 V^estcott, p. 1 1 6. 



230 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

national greatness and moral influence ever since. 
France rejected it ; and in its place has had the 
gospel of Voltaire, with all the anarchy, misery, 
and bloodshed of those ceaseless revolutions of 
which that gospel is the parent." 

How powerful was the influence of the Bible in 
Puritan times we all know. The letters of Crom- 
well are full of its most passionate words. With 
the invectives of the Psalms on his lips, the 
Roundhead rushed on his foe and smote him, as 
he was often heard to say, as Samson smote the 
Philistines, hip and thigh with a great slaughter. 
The chapters in "Old Mortality" are no carica- 
tures. They are rather grim, and yet faithful re- 
productions of scenes and character and conversa- 
tions familiar in those stormy times in the land 
oi shaggy heath and wild foaming streams. The 
patriotism of Scotland was nourished in Isaiah, as 
afterward the hope of the slave in the Southern 
States was nourished in the Exodus ; and in both 
instances under the Old Testament rather than the 
New, "despair sublimed to power." The Bible 
is the book of the nation. Patriotism as much 
as piety celebrates a victory when on the very^ 
spot in lyondon where the Council condemned the 
remains of Wycliffe to be dug up and burned, 
the British and Foreign Bible Society builds its 
central offices.^ When the Revised Version was 

1 The Bible House, Queen Victoria St., London. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 231 

ready^ its appearance was looked for as eagerly as 
any event of national importance. The quantity 
of paper ordered for the edition was so enormous, 
that had the sheets been piled one upon another 
in reams as they left the mill, it is said that 
they would have formed a column ten times the 
height of St. Paul's Cathedral ; or, had they been 
made into a strip six inches wide, it would have 
been sufficient " to put a girdle round the world. " ^ 
There is no other book which can be said to illus- 
trate as does the English Bible the progress of 
national life. Wycliffe's translation was made at 
a time when authority was supreme. The people 
had not found their voice, and only very slowly 
were they coming to believe that they had any 
right to a voice at all. Chaucer dared assert in 
the "Parson's Tale," that "humble folks be 
Christ's friends," but the parson's brother, the 
ploughman, is himself a peasant of the subserv- 
ient type, one of the long and hopeless proces- 
sion of English laborers who have been taught 
in the catechism of the national church " to 
order myself lowly and reverently to all my bet- 
ters — not to covet nor desire other men's goods ; 
but to learn and labor truly to get mine own liv- 
ing, and to do my duty in that state of life unto 
which it shall please God to call me. ' ' As Rich- 
ard Jefferies has told us, it was only " after many 

1 Geo. W. Moon, " Ecclesiastical English." Preface. 



232 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

centuries, in the year in which they received the 
franchise," that the peasants in the parish church 
were not compelled to sit in a draught. A signifi- 
cant illustration of the way in which the assump- 
tion of authority lingered is found in the history 
of the Revised Version. The heading of Psalm 
149, in our modern edition, reads : " The prophet 
exhorteth to praise God for his love to the church 
and for that power which he hath given to the 
church." To this, however, the original edition, 
1611, added, " to rule the consciences of man."^ 
Ivingard, the Roman Catholic historian, is no 
doubt right in asserting that by his translation 
of the Bible, Wycliffe put into the hands of his 
preachers and of the people an engine which must 
ultimately destroy this condition of civil and reli- 
gious thralldom. Men were flattered by the appeal 
to their private judgment ; the new doctrines insen- 
sibly gained partisans and protectors in the higher 
classes, who alone were acquainted with the use 
of letters ; a spirit of inquiry was generated, and 
the seeds were sown of that religious revolution 
which, in little more than a century, astonished 
and convulsed the nations of Europe.^ The 
authorities were not mistaken in recognizing in 
the free circulation of the Scriptures, a menace to 
their monopoly of power ; nor are we surprised to 

1 Edgar, p. 322. 

2 Lingard's " History of England," Vol. III., p. 31 1. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 233 

find that in many of the dioceses of England — 
such as Norwich and I^incoln for example — men 
were punished for reading in the vernacular what 
was called the '^ New I^aw." ^ 

When the reign of authority ceased, it was only 
to give place to that compromise between au- 
thority and liberty which men call toleration. 
There was no broader principle than this recog- 
nized when the King James Version appeared, 
and when the Episcopalian was settling in Vir- 
ginia, and the Puritan was settling in Massachu- 
setts. But the leaven of the Bible was working ; 
and so, after long centuries the struggle began 
which only closed in our own day with the com- 
plete triumph of religious liberty. How patiently 
its advances were watched we are reminded by 
the clamor which was raised when, by a slight 
misprint, the word "ye" was substituted for 
"we" in Acts 6 : 3, and the verse was made to 
read : Wherefore brethren^ look ye out among 
you^ seven men of honest report^ full of the Holy 
Ghost and wisdom^ whom ye may appoint over 
this business. Here was proof positive of the 
democratic spirit, and the Scotch Presbyterians 
were responsible for it. The word of God was to 
be corrupted in order that it might seem to coun- 
tenance the people in their claim to elect their 
own ministers. The General Assembly hastened 

1 Angus, p. 40. 



234 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

to deny the imputation, condemning tlie error, 
and declaring that they allowed " no power in the 
people, but only in the pastors of the church to 
appoint or ordain church officers. ' ' ^ 

But the Bible held on its way, and freedom came 
with it. Twenty-five years before the Conti- 
nental Congress met in the State House in Phila- 
delphia, the bell was cast whose iron tongue rang 
out the message which its founders had placed 
upon it : Proclaim liberty throughout all the land^ 
to all the inhabitants thereof. The new liberty 
bell which celebrates the discovery of America, as 
well as the Declaration of Independence, bears 
the old inscription, but around its crown there is 
the added verse : Glory to God in the highest^ 
and on earth peace ^ good will toward men^ while 
on its face we read the still more significant 
words : A 7tew commandment I give unto you^ 
That ye love one another. Who shall say how 
wide-spread, or how powerful the influence of the 
Bible has been in bringing us to our present con- 
dition of national equality ? The struggle has 
lasted for hundreds of years. There have been 
dark and dreadful hours in our history, alike in 
England and in America, when the Bible has had 
stern work to do, and has done it. In the first 
pangs of the anti-slavery conflict, Henry Ward 
Beecher collected money to furnish to the settlers 

1 Edgar, p. 298. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 235 

in Kansas both Bibles and rifles. '* Some of the 
rifles were sent in boxes marked ' Bibles,' but 
without his knowledge, and so passed in safety- 
through Missouri and the enemy's lines. Hence 
the term ' Beecher's Bibles ' came to be ap- 
plied to these effective weapons." ^ The remedy 
for the great wrong of slavery was drastic, but it 
was not hastily applied. Lincoln was more 
prophet than president, when in language which 
could only have been written by a constant reader 
of the Bible, and a reverent admirer of its teach- 
ings, he said in his last inaugural : 

' ' Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it 
must needs be that offenses come, but woe unto 
that man by whom the ofiense cometh. If we 
shall suppose that American slavery is one of those 
offenses, which in the providence of God must 
needs come, but which having continued through 
his appointed time he now wills to remove, and 
that he gives both to North and South this ter- 
rible war as the woe due those by whom the 
offense came, shall we discern therein any depart- 
ure from those Divine attributes which the be- 
lievers in a loving God always ascribe to him? 
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that 
this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away. 
Yet if God wills that it continue until all the 
wealth piled by the bondmen's two hundred and 

1 Beecher and Scoville's " Life of Henry Ward Beecher," p. 283. 



236 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and 
until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall 
be paid by another drawn by the sword — as was 
said three thousand years ago — so still must it be 
said, the judgments of the L<ord are true and 
righteous altogether." 

Where the statesman found his message in the 
crisis, the poet found his also. So we think of 
the lad Whittier — he was scarcely more than a 
lad — as he pictures himself, his day's work over, 
coming home from the fields, and by the winter 
fireside having his spirit stirred by the Bible until 
he drank in the truth to which all his life he was 
so true, that ' ' men must fear God, and make an 
end of evil. ' ' The progress of the nation is in- 
separably connected with the honor which it pays 
to the Bible. A Bible-reading people can never 
be enslaved. From the bondage in which they 
may be born they shall surely break away. The 
line of thought which we have been pursuing 
cannot better be summed up than in the words of 
Daniel Webster : " If we abide by the principles 
taught in the Bible our country will go on pros- 
pering and to prosper ; but if we and our poster- 
ity neglect its instruction and authority, no man 
can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm 
us, and bury all our glory in profound obscurity. " 

3. The influence of the Bible has been no less 
marked in the development of liberty where once 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 237 

it lias been gained, than in the struggles insepar- 
able to its acquisition. It is the ally of that 
eternal vigilance which is the price of freedom. 
''The sheet anchor of our liberties," as General 
Grant called it, it is also true that no more power- 
ful agency to promote loyalty exists. Tyndale ap- 
pealed to Henry VIII. to recognize this when his 
translation of the Scriptures lay under the royal 
displeasure. " Is there more danger in the king's 
subjects than in the subjects of all other princes, 
which, in every of their tongues have the same, 
under privilege of their sufferance?"^ What 
Coleridge said of the Proverbs holds with equal 
force of the whole book : " It is the best states- 
man's manual ever written." When Webster de- 
clared that the Christian religion was the founda- 
tion of civil society he only echoed the words of 
Sir Matthew Hale : ' ' Christianity is parcel of the 
common law," and the roots of that conviction 
strike deep and far into English history. No one 
who has studied the annals of the Puritans in 
New England, no one who has followed the for- 
tunes of the colonists, no one familiar with the 
spirit of the American Revolution, will be prepared 
to question the assertion of Secretary Seward that 
there is a law higher than the Constitution, and 
regulating the authority of Congress — the law of 
God and the interests of humanity. This is the 
1 Anderson's " English Bible," Vol. I., p. 273. 



238 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

law which speaks in the Scripture, and Seward is 
undoubtedly right when he says again that ' ' the 
existing government of this country could never 
have had an existence but for the Bible. ' ' The 
speech which first made Lincoln known to the peo- 
ple who were afterward to elect him their president, 
attracted attention by nothing so much as by its 
fearless appropriation of one of Christ's own figures. 
When he was composing it he refused to change it 
at the earnest solicitation of his supporters. That 
expression is a truth of all human experience, 
a house divided against itself cannot stand. ' ' The 
proposition also is true, and has been for six thou- 
sand years. I want to use some universally known 
figure expressed in simple language as universally 
well-known, that may strike home to the minds 
of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the 
times. I would rather be defeated with this ex- 
pression in the speech, and uphold and discuss it 
before the people, than be victorious without it." ^ 
An influence underlying sound government, the 
Bible is no less powerful in the development of 
national spirit. It was patriotism that stimulated 
the monk Aelfric to translate parts of 
the Bible into English in the eleventh 
century. " This book," he says of his version of 
Joshua, ' ' I turned into English for Ealdorman 
Ethelward, a book that a prince might study in 

1 « Abraham Lincoln." By W. H. Herndon, Vol. II., pp. 66, 67. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 239 

times of invasion and turbulence '^ ; and of Judith 
he writes, as we have already seen : '^ Englished 
for your example, that you may also defend your 
country by force of arms against the outrage of 
foreign hosts. ' ' ^ The bravest hearts of the day 
beat in unison with the great enterprise of Wycliffe. 
'' One comfort," he says, " is of knights, that they 
understand much the gospel, and will have to read 
in English the gospel of Christ's life."^ It was to 
national spirit that he appealed, when he claimed for 
his countrymen the right to have the word of God in 
their own tongue: ' ' For why are we to be the dregs 
of the nation ? ' ' The passion for adventure and 
discovery which took the place of knight-errantry 
has never failed to distinguish the Anglo-Saxon, 
and the Bible has been his companion in his travels 
and voyages. The tract which was found among 
the remains of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated party 
contained a text of Scripture (Eccl. 12 : i) under- 
scored ; and the highest grave northward on the 
face of our earth, the grave of another discoverer, 
bears the cry of David in his penitence, " Wash 
me^ and I shall be whiter than snow^ 

In rousing the spirit of a people to resist the op- 
pression of its rulers the Bible has done priceless 
service. From Cromwell, who loved to harangue 
his troopers from those great texts in the Old Tes- 
tament which illustrated God's course in history, 

1 Talbot, p. 49. 2 Westcott, p. 20. 



240 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

to Maurice, who saw, in the same book, " the 
great witness for liberty, the witness of the sacred- 
ness of this earth," we have a long succession of pa- 
triotic preachers who have with their stirring words 
quickened the national pulse. As Prof. George 
Adam Smith has lately pointed out, the sermons 
of the Ironsides and Covenanters, as well as their 
treatises, were inspired by " the narratives of the 
election of Saul and David, from the part played 
by the people in the coronation of the latter king, 
from the subjection of the king to the covenant, 
as well as from many passages of the prophets. 
When we remember that the book from which 
they were drawn was already in the hands and 
hearts of the common people, we appreciate how 
much of the liberty which these wonderful centu- 
ries secured to us is due to the Old Testament. ' ' ^ 
No better illustration can be found of the close 
connection between a lofty national spirit and the 
study of the Bible than is furnished by Scotland. 
That same Old Testament has for hundreds of 
years stimulated the patriotism of the country. 
It has given battle cries to its warriors, and texts to 
its preachers, and imagery to its orators, and models 
to its heroes and martyrs, while in humbler and 
less exciting scenes, ' ' The Cotter's Saturday 
Night ' ' closes most fitly when, — 

1 G. A. Smith, " Preaching of the Old Testament to the Age," pp. 
20-22. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 241 

The priest-like father reads the sacred page, 

How Abram was the friend of God on high ; 
Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage 

With Amalek's ungracious progeny ; 
Or how the royal Bard did groaning lie 

Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire ; 
Or Job's pathetic plaint and wailing cry; 

Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire ; 
Or other holy scenes that tune the sacred lyre. 

It was on Scottish soil that in our own day Mr. 
Beecher made one of his noblest pleas for the slave, 
and the spirit of the Covenanter might have in- 
spired its most solemn words : ' ' Remember ! 
remember ! remember ! we are carrying out our 
dead. Our sons, our brothers' sons, our sisters' 
children, are in this great war of liberty and of 
principle. ' ' ^ The pathos of the allusion gained 
its power from the fact that the conflict was 
at that moment waging most fiercely. Others 
were feeling the same, and turning to the same 
old book of comfort. At the outbreak of the civil 
war there was no portion of Scripture so often 
read by Governor Geo. N. Briggs of Massachusetts 
as the seventy-seventh Psalm, and in his favorite 
Bible he has marked completely around with his 
pencil the fourth verse. Thou holdest mine eyes 
waking, 

4. Let us turn from national spirit to national 
industry. The Bible has constantly upheld the 

1 Speech at Glasgow, Oct. 13, 1863. 
Q 



242 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

dignity of labor. The serf found consolation in 
its pages before liis freedom came, the peasant 
does so amid the monotony of his lot to-day, and 
so did the Pilgrims in their conflict with hardship 
on the cheerless New England coast. It ought 
to be noted that the Bible by discovering new 
needs opens up fresh avenues for commerce. 
Civilization and culture, both following in the 
refining wake of religion, stimulate industries 
even where they do not actually create them. 
The copyist in the earlier ages was an artist who 
commanded high prices for his work ; and the 
printing of the Bible still goes on regardless of 
the fluctuation of taste and trade. The Royal 
Exchange in lyond on bears across- its portico the. 
words : The earth is the Lord^s^ and the fulness 
thereof; the electric cable linking the old world 
to the new flashed a verse of the Bible as its earli- 
est message ; and the first parcel sent through the 
pneumatic postal tube in Philadelphia was a Bible 
with the label, " The first use of the first pneu- 
matic postal tube in the United States is to send 
through it a copy of the Holy Scriptures — the 
greatest message ever given to the world. Cover- 
ing the Bible is the American flag — the emblem 
of freedom of sixty-three millions of happy 
people." 

"The best businessman I have ever known," 
Mr. Whitelaw Reid wrote a few years since, 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 243 

*' memorized the entire book of Proverbs at 
twenty-two "; and Prof. G. A. Smith pays a tribute 
to the service it has rendered to the most success- 
ful mercantile nation in the world, when he says : 
'' We cannot overestimate the effect which till a 
recent date the regular exposition of the book of 
Proverbs in church and school and home has 
exercised upon the Scottish character." 

5. But there is something even more essential 
than commerce to a prosperous national life : we 
mean conduct. And here the influence of the Bible 
is so generally recognized that it is scarcely nec- 
essary for us to dwell upon it at all. Henry VIII. 
unwittingly owned its power when he complained 
that the book was " disputed, rhymed, sung, and 
jangled in every ale-house and tavern." " Of 
conduct," Matthew Arnold said, " which is more 
than three-fourths of life, the Bible, whatever peo- 
ple may think or say, is the great inspirer " ; and 
to an earlier generation, Thomas Jefferson be- 
queathed the conviction that " of all the systems 
of morality, ancient and modern, which have 
come under my observation, none appear to me so 
pure as that of Jesus." 

So we come, in closing this chapter, to the 
cradle of conduct, the home. The Bible is em- 
phatically the book for the home. 

A. D. 153Q. 

The royal proclamation on the publi- 
cation of the Great Bible, enjoined upon the king's 



244 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

faithful subjects that "avoiding all contentions 
and disputations in ale-houses and other places, 
you use this most high benefit quietly and chari- 
tably, every one of you, to the edifying of himself, 
his wife, and family." ^ The land of the home is 
the land of the Bible. '' For three centuries," 
Prof. Huxley has said, " this book has been 
woven into the life of all that is best and 
noblest in English history ; it has become the 
national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to 
noble and simple from John O' Groat's house 
to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were 
to the Italians." Winning its way to the 
hearts of Royalists and Puritans alike, the Author- 
ized Version held its unique place in English 
homes — dear to Jeremy Taylor as it was to Pachard 
Baxter, to George Herbert as to John Milton — the 
one abiding bond of peace when all other bonds 
were snapped. And in our own time we may re- 
member how in the persistent labors of many 
years of unrequited and scarcely recognized toil, 
the scholars of England and America joined in 
the work of revision. No other literary labor 
could have united so large a number of accom- 
plished and devoted men. In the majority of 
cases their passion for the book was undoubtedly 
first kindled at the firesides of the old and new 
homes, and the Anglo-American Revision will al- 

1 Westcott, p. 105. 



THE BIBLE AND THE NATION. 245 

ways remain the noblest monument of Christian 
union and co-operation in this nineteenth century. 
Who can wonder that in its free circulation among 
English speaking people, the friends of patriotism 
and of piety see the true solution of the problems 
perplexing the minds of civil as well of religious 
reformers ? So Bishop Boyd Carpenter says with 
truth : '* If there is ever to be a communion 
among the various denominations of Christians 
throughout the world, it can only come by the 
honest, patient, careful, reverent, determined, and 
unself-willed study of the old book of God. 
Again, if there is ever to be in communities a high 
and lofty standard of civic duty and individual 
duty, and of the life which a man and a citizen 
ought to live among his fellows, then you can 
only have that by reverencing once more the 
Bible." ^ 

Driven out of her right course a few summers 
ago, a ship sailing across the Pacific reached an 
island inhabited by some thirty men and women, 
who fifteen years before had been shipwrecked 
upon it. They had failed to save a single relic of 
their past lives. Clothes and tools and food they 
had indeed preserved. But the trifling reminders 
and insignificant mementos of home and father- 
land had all perished in the storm which spared 
to them little more than their own lives. With 

1 Speech, 1893. 



246 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

an agony of longing these lost treasures were re- 
membered. "If," one poor woman cried, ''if I 
had only a rag which I had worn in my old 
home ! " So long as we preserve our English 
Bible this bitter memory cannot haunt us. It is 
the sacred center about which cluster and cling 
all the sweet sanctities of home ; and if the home 
carries in it the nucleus of all government and or- 
der, the Bible, which lies at the very heart of the 
home, is the most powerful influence upon which 
the patriotism of the nation can rely, and to which 
the instincts of sound government in the nation 
may confidently appeal, and from which the pros- 
perity of the nation will in all ages gain its most 
healthful impulses. 



XII. 
IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 



'*In every heart that is won from the love of sin 
to the love of God, that is crushed in sorrow and 
strengthened in the presence of temptation by the 
writings of psalmists, prophets, and apostles, I find 
evidence that * holy men of old spake as they were 
moved by the Holy Spirit.' "—J?. W. Dale, D. D. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE BIBI.E IN SPIRITUAI. LIFE. 

A PERSONAL friend of Cardinal Manning has told 
us how, after long and eventful years of absence, 
duty brought him into the neighborhood of the 
lovely village ir Sussex where he began his ca- 
reer as a minister in the Church of England. As 
he stood in silence beside the grave of his wife, 
who had died after a very few years of married 
life, it must have been difficult to recall the time 
when this great prince in the Roman Catholic 
Church had made for himself a happy home in 
the quiet English parish. His friend, in describ- 
ing the visit, adds : ''I accompanied him into the 
church and showed him a New Testament with 
the inscription ' H. E. Manning, 1845.' He laid 
his hand on the book, saying : ' Times change and 
men change, but this never changes.' " ^ 

So we come to speak of the Bible as the one 
continuous influence in the inner life of our 
race. Cardinal Manning was right, " This never 
changes." Who shall attempt to measure the 
influence, for example, of the life of Jesus as it 
is told by the evangelists? Dr. James Hamilton, 

1 "Nineteenth Century," 1892, p. 283. 



250 THE HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

himself one of the saintliest of men, said on one 
occasion : "I have a great hankering to write the 
true Acta Sanctorum^ the story of all the heroic and 
beautiful deeds which have been impelled by love 
to the Saviour." Peasants as much as princes for 
now five hundred years have walked with Jesus 
along the pages of our English Bible, and their 
hearts have burned within them as he talked with 
them by the way, and opened to them the Script- 
ures. Bidding the philosophers and schoolmen of 
his times return to the Great Biography, Erasmus 
said : " If the footprints of Christ are anywhere shown 
to us, we kneel down and adore. Why do we not 
rather venerate the living and breathing picture of 
him in these books ? If the vesture of Christ be 
exhibited, where will we not go to kiss it ? Yet 
were his whole wardrobe exhibited, nothing could 
represent Christ more vividly and truly than those 
evangelical writings. Were we to have seen him 
with our own eyes we should not have so intimate 
a knowledge as they give of Christ, speaking, heal- 
ing, dying, rising again, as it were, in our own 

actual presence."^ 

I. Notice first, the power of the English Bible in 
kindling life in the soul. When, toward the close of 
his reign, Henry VIII. tells his subjects that he is 
* ' very sorry to know and hear how unre verently that 
most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, 

1 Seebohm, " The Oxford Refonners of 1498," p. 257, 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 251 

rhymed, sung, and jangled in every ale-house and 
tavern," he unwittingly testifies to this power. 
Bitter and often purposeless as they have been, the 
theological conflicts which have so frequently 
raged in England remind us of it. Everything 
lives whither the river cometh. We hang the 
weapons of religious controversy in the temple 
of Scripture as witnesses to the quickening 
force of the Bible. Listening to the taunts 
with which polemics darkened the sun and 
poisoned the air in the English Reformation, — 
" He is a Pharisee, he is a Gospeller, he is of 
the new sort, he is of the old faith, he is a new- 
broached brother, he is a good Catholic father, 
he is a papist, he is a heretic," ^ — and mindful of 
their echoes in our own times, we have at all 
events this consolation : The Bible wakens the 
minds of men wherever its voice is heard. In 
the same reign to which we have just referred, 
English history furnishes many instances of this 
power, when the church was either supine or an- 
tagonistic. The parishioners of a Somersetshire 
village cursed with a curate who will not teach 
them or preach, giving his time rather " to dicing, 
carding, and bowling," apply to the rector of the 
next parish, who occasionally comes over and 
gives them a sermon and teaches them to read the 

1 C. Hardwick, " A History of the Christian Church during the 
Reformation," p. 373. 



252 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

New Testament. Suddenly, one Good Friday, 
their own priest enters the pulpit for the first time 
in many years, and harangues against the new 
order of things : "If any man will preach the 
New Testament, if I may hear him, I am ready to 
fight with him incontinent." "Indeed," the poor 
people add ruefully, "he applieth in such wise 
his school of fence so sore continually that he fill- 
eth with fear all his parishioners." ^ The annal- 
ist of the Reformation, John Strype, has given a 
vivid picture of the eagerness with which England 
roused herself to the study of Coverdale's Bible. 
" Everybody that could, bought or busily read it, 
or got others to read it to them if they could not 
themselves ; and divers more elderly people learned 
to read on purpose, and even little boys flocked 
among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Script- 
ures read. ' ' ^ Before this general passion for the 
study of the Bible in their mother tongue, the peo- 
ple of England swept aside the affectation of the 
schoolmen — twenty doctors, as Tyndale put it, 
expounding one text twenty ways — and went 
straight to the simple meaning of each verse. 
Colet, who did more to restore the Bible to its 
true place than any other English Reformer, sit- 
ting alone during the winter vacation, in his 
chambers at Oxford, was visited by a priest who 
often attended his expository lectures. They drew 

* 1 Stoughton, p. 146. 2 ibid^ p_ i^8_ 



THE BIBLE IN SPIKITUAL LIFE. 253 

their chairs to the hearth and began talking. "At 
length the priest pulled from his bosom a little 
book, and Colet, amused at the manner of his 
guest, smilingly quoted the words : Where your 
treasure is^ there will your heart be also^ The 
book turned out to be a copy of the Epistles of 
Paul which the priest had carefully transcribed 
with his own hand, and the purpose of his visit was 
to get light upon the truths of which they were so 
full. "I ask you now," said he to the great ex- 
pounder, " as we sit here at our ease, to extract and 
bring to light from this hidden treasure, which you 
say is so rich, some of these truths, so that I may 
gain from this our talk whilst sitting together some- 
thing to store up in the memory, and at the same 
time catch some hints as to how, following your 
example, to seize hold of the main points in the 
Epistles when I read St. Paul to myself." Colet was 
only too glad to engage in such congenial work : " My 
good friend, I will do as you wish. Open your book, 
and we will see how many and what golden truths 
we can gather from the first chapter only of the 
Epistle to the Romans." Only detached rings, as 
Colet said, carelessly cut from the golden ore of 
St. Paul as they sat over the winter fire, but show- 
ing how much wealth even a single chapter holds ! ^ 
No doubt this is only one of a multitude of in- 
stances. What all the pageantry of the church 

Seebohm, " Oxford Reformers," p. 22. 



254 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

had failed to do, this little volume accomplished. 
Sharper than the two-edged sword, it pierced the 
soul and discerned the thoughts and intents of the 
heart. 

Nor were its words easily shaken off. At fifteen 
years of age a lad heard John Flavel, the Puritan, 
preach from the text, If any man love not the 
Lord Jesus Christy let him be anathem,a maran- 
atha. The sermon seemed to make no impression. 
A soldier in Cromwell's army and present at the 
execution of Charles I. , the young man cared noth- 
ing for religion, and when he emigrated to America 
lived a whole lifetime in utter neglect of its claims. 
At length, when one hundred years of age, he was 
working on his farm at Middlesboro, when sud- 
denly the word to which he had listened eighty- 
five years before flashed on his mind. He saw once 
more the preacher rising to pronounce the bene- 
diction, he heard his tones as he exclaimed: " How 
shall I bless the whole assembly, when every per- 
son in it who loveth not the I^ord Jesus is anath- 
ema mar an atha I " He became bitterly con- 
scious that through all these intervening years no 
minister had blessed him, and then and there he 
sought mercy at the hands of a long-neglected Sa- 
viour, and to extreme old age, for he lived fifteen 
years after that time, bore his testimony to the 
irresistible power of the word of God and to the 
marvelous mercy of its author. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIEITUAL LIFE.. 255 

3. The same divine Spirit who kindles the light 
keeps it burning. He who by his word quickens 
life in the soul does not forsake the work of his own 
hand. We may think, therefore, of the influence 
of our English Bible in maintaining spiritual life. 
*' The Bible," said I^uther, *' cannot be understood 
except through perplexities and temptations." To 
the times of persecution when the lover of truth and 
righteousness contested at fearful odds with priests 
and monarchs who, "red with ravine," shrieked 
against his creed, we turn for illustrations of 
Luther's assertion. Could the manuscript copies of 
Wycliffe's Bible revised by Purvey, tell us their 
stories, truth might indeed be found to be far more 
entrancing than fiction. More than a hundred 
and fifty such manuscripts remain to-day, many of 
them thumbed and worn with constant use ; others 
much mutilated, torn, and soiled ; and some bear- 
ing eloquent traces "of the concealment into which 
they were hurried in times of trouble."^ When 
Tyndale's Testament came over to England in 
consignments from Holland, Thomas Garret, curate 
of All Hallow's Church, London, was among the 
first to receive them. We revert to the inci- 
dent of which we have already made mention. 
In vain Wolsey searched all London for him. 
He was followed to Oxford, whither he had 
carried his treasure. Unsafe there, he fled again, 

1 Storrs, " John Wycliffe," p. 69. 



256 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

but after he had gone a day^s journey and a 
half he was so fearful " that his heart would no 
other but he must return." Coming back he was 
immediately apprehended, but again escaped and 
sought out his friend Dalabor, who has left us the 
story. Dalabor disguised him in his own coat — 
*' which my mother had given me," and after they 
had kneeled down both together on their knees, 
the friends embraced and kissed one the other, . . 
^'and so he departed from me " — the record runs — 
"apparelled in my coat." The true-hearted friend 
tells us how when Garret had gone down the stairs 
from his chamber, and was flying toward Wales, he 
straightway shut his door, and went into his study; 
* ' shutting the second door, and with the New 
Testament of Erasmus in my hand, kneeled down 
on my knees, and with many a deep sigh and salt 
tear, I did with much deliberation read over the 
tenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and com- 
mit unto God our dearly beloved brother Gar- 
ret." The prayer was not answered at once in 
the deliverance of his friend. He was captured, 
and before many days, in company with Dalabor, 
and others destined to play an important part in 
the coming struggle of the Reformation, did pen- 
ance at the public burning of the obnoxious books. ^ 
William Hunter, a London apprentice, who, in 
the year 1555, was fouud reading his Bible in the 
1 Westcott, pp. 46-49. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 257 

chapel of Brentwood, played the man more cour- 
ageously than did the Oxford scholars. '* It was 
never merry world," cried the priest who discov- 
ered him, " since the Bible came abroad in Eng- 
lish." Nor could it have added to its joyousness 
when the brave boy for his alleged heresy was 
burnt at the stake in his native village. His 
mother, who plainly shared his views, stood by 
him to the last. Coming down through the cen- 
turies we catch his words still : "In my little pain 
which I shall suffer, which is but a short braid, 
Christ hath promised me, mother, a crown of joy ; 
may you not be glad of that, mother? " The mother 
knelt down and cried, "I pray God strengthen 
thee, my son, to the end. Yea, I think thee as 
w^ell bestowed as any child that I ever bare." ^ At 
the stake William cast his psalm book into the 
hands of his brother, Robert ; and Robert, who 
was as courageous as he, said : ' ' William, think on 
the holy passion of Christ, and be not afraid of 
death.'* They seem to have been a family of 
heroes, nourished in the strong truths of Scripture ; 
for his father, as his son went to be burned, encour- 
aged him to hold out. " God be with thee, son 
William," and William answered, "God be with 
you, good father, and be of good comfort ; for I 
hope we shall meet again, when we shall be merry." 
At the stake William took a wet, brown faggot and 

I Foxe, Vol. VI., pp. 723-727. 



258 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

kneeled down thereon and read the fifty-first 
Psalm." 

From a manuscript of John Foxe, the martyr- 
ologist, we learn the history of William Maldon. 
At fifteen years old he would listen to the reading 
of the Bible by a band of poor men who had all 
contributed to buy it but his father fetched him 
away and set him to saying his lyatin prayer in- 
stead. ' ' This put him upon the thought of learn- 
ing to read English, that so he might read the 
New Testament himself ; which when he had by 
diligence efiected, he and his father's apprentice 
bought the New Testament, — -joining their earn- 
ings together, and to conceal it laid it under the 
bed-straw, and read it at convenient times." 
But his mother told her husband of the boy's opin- 
ions — how he would not worship the cross which 
was about him when he was christened, and would 
be laid on him when he was dead — and the father 
hastened to his son's chamber, and pulling him 
out of bed by his hair, whipped him unmercifully. 
And when the young man bore this beating with 
a kind of joy, considering it was for Christ's sake, 
and shed not a tear, the father, more enraged, ran 
and fetched a halter and put it about his neck, 
saying he would hang him." The boy escaped, 
however, and survived to tell Foxe the story, 
which illustrates the struggles going on in Eng- 
land, no doubt in many a quiet village and 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 259 

country town, between the old order which was 
doomed to pass away, and the new thought which 
was destined passing through its baptism of fire, 
to conquer/ The quiet heroism of young appren- 
tices and weak women, as it survives in the re- 
cords of the dark days of Henry VIII. and Queen 
Mary, speaks volumes. "You be not ashamed," 
cried the spy, who had informed against the wife 
of William Living in the time of Wolsey, "to tell 
wherefore you come hither ! " " No, ' ' was the ready 
answer "that I am not, for it is for Christ's Tes- 
tament." John Lambert, who was burned in 
1538, exclaiming as he lifted his fingers flaming 
with fire, "None but Christ, none but Christ," 
was on the side which was destined to prevail 
when he dared to remonstrate with Henry VIII. 
in the words of the second Psalm : Be wise now 
therefore^ Oye ki7tgs ; be instructed^ ye judges of the 
earth. The days of the persecution gave place in 
due time to happier hours, but they left scars in 
merry England which will never vanish, and 
lighted, as heroic Hugh Latimer said, such a 
candle as shall never be put out. 

There are worse martyrdoms, however, than 
those which we have been recalling. In the 
conflict with doubt and perplexity our Bible has 
cleared the mind as notably as in the sufferings of 
the body it calmed and strengthened the spirit. 

1 WestcoU, p. 107. 



260 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

Here Chaucer's Poor Parson learned not only how 
to preach Christ, but also how to live him. Here 
earnest souls found words for their sighings in 
early versions of the Psalms, which remain still : 
" Blessed lyord, have mercy on me, for of myself 
I have no strength . , . Good I^ord, be thou 
turned unto me, and deliver my soul from this 
tribulation ! "^ Here the Princess Mary, her body 
racked with sickness and her heart growing bitter 
and sour with neglect, found light in her darkness 
in translating the Gospel of John.^ Her half-sister 
Elizabeth has left her testimony to the consolation 
of Scripture in her copy of Coverdale's New Testa- 
ment, where one may still read, in her own writ- 
ing, these words : 

Amonge good thinges 
I prove and finde, the quiet 
life doth muche abounde, 
and sure to the contentid 
Mynde, there is no riches 
may be founde. 
Your lovinge 
maistres 
Elizabeth. 

"The writing," says Dore in his description of 
this little volume which the princess gave to her 
maid of honor, " is in Elizabeth's fine bold hand. "' 

The first ruler of England who was really wor- 
thy to follow Elizabeth in the true succession— 

1 Stoughton, p. 68. ' Ibid., p. 172. ^ Dore, p. 96. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 261 

Oliver Cromwell — when himself stricken with 
fatal illness, heartbroken at the death of his 
favorite daughter, Mrs. Claypole, listened to 
Paul's great assurance, / can do all things through 
Christ which strengtheneth 7ne^ and put his 
own hand and seal to it with the words, "This 
Scripture did once save my life : when my eldest 
son died, which went as a dagger to my heart ; 
indeed it did." Two psalms — the one hun- 
dred and twenty-first and the one hundred and 
thirty-fifth — were read in the humble home of 
David Ivivingstone's father, on the day when the 
young missionary left it for Africa, and then he 
and his old father walked from Blantyre to Glas- 
gow, to part with one another on the sailing of the 
Liverpool steamer ; and years afterward the famil- 
iar words of the Psalter are woven into the same 
noble biography when Mrs. Moffat, his mother-in- 
law, writes to him : " My dear son lyivingstone, 
unceasing prayer is made for you. When I think 
of you, my heart will go upward : Keep hi^n as the 
apple of thine eye. Hold him in the hollow of thine 
hand^ are the ejaculations of my heart." Indeed, 
the Psalms have a history of their own of incompar- 
able preciousness ; and the pious Scottish worthies, 
gathering courage and patience from them, would 
find their hearts beating to music associated with 
the grandest chapters in their countr)''s annals, as 
well as with the most inspiring confidences of 



262 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

their spiritual experience. If Cromwell sang the 
one hundred and seventeenth Psalm with his 
valorous soldiers on the battlefield of Dunbar, in 
happier scenes Philip Henry would close with the 
same words his Sunday morning services, as the 
fullest expression of a congregation's thanksgiv- 
ing. We turn to the story of I^azarus with added 
interest when we see the poet Cowper, walking in 
the garden, pause before a seat on which some 
kindly hand has laid a Bible, and open it at 
this touching chapter, reading until the cloud of 
horror which has so long hung over him moves 
away before the record of "so much benevolence 
and mercy and goodness and sympathy with mis- 
erable men." The adjustment of doctrines is not 
impossible to him who will follow Ruskin's ad- 
vice : "I never met with but one book in my life 
that was clear on the subject of works and faith, 
and that book is the Bible. Read it only on this 
subject." * The clouds of doubt dissipate if with 
John Duncan we consent to be the passive re- 
cipients of truth familiar to us from childhood.^ 
The joy which has so often eluded our search and 
mocked our entreaty is ours when we believe the 
truth with which William Wilberforce closed his 
life: ''I never knew happiness till I found Christ 
as a Saviour. Read the Bible ; read the Bible. ' ' 

1 " English Illustrated Magazine," 1893. 

? " Memoir of Dr. Duncan," by David Brown, p. 155. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIEITUAL LIFE. 263 

For the critical moments of our spiritual history 
the Bible has a special fitness, but not less is it 
the book for our daily life. Here, indeed, is the 
supreme test of its power. As Whittier sings — it 
is easier — 

To smite with Peter's sword 
Than watch one hour in humble prayer. 
Life's great things, like the Syrian lord, 
Our hearts can do and dare. 

To Sir Jghn Simpson, the eminent surgeon, there 
was no part of Scripture dearer than the twentieth 
Psalm, and that because he had so often known 
his mother, in her poverty, sit down and repeat it, 
and rise refreshed. The children learned to call 
it "mother's psalm." Nearly half the copies ex- 
tant of Purvey's version of Wycliffe's Bible are, 
says Westcott, " of a small size, such as could 
be made the constant daily companions of their 
owners." Because of its rarity, the rude block 
book, printed in the fourteenth century under the 
name of the "Poor Man's Bible," now fetches a 
great sum ; but the fragments which have survived 
witness by their torn and soiled condition how 
much they have been read in humble English 
homes. Elizabeth's copy of the New Testament 
bears this record of her days of restraint at Wool- 
wich : " I walk many times into the pleasant fields 
of Holy Scripture, where I pluck up goodly sen- 
tences by pruning, eat them by reading, chew 



264 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

them by musing, and lay them up at length in the 
high seat of memory ; that, having tasted their 
sweetness, I may the less perceive the bitterness 
of this miserable life." These words may almost 
have suggested the passage in which the version of 
King James is commended to the reader, as " a 
shower of heavenly bread sufficient for a whole 
host, be it never so great ; and a whole cellar full 
of oil vessels ; whereby all our necessities may be 
provided for, and our debts discharged. " Foxe has 
the same image in his mind when he says that in 
the early years of the sixteenth century, " great mul- 
titudes tasted and followed the sweetness of God's 
holy word. " And the image changes but not the ex- 
perience, when the General Assembly congratulates 
the Scottish people on the day which has dawned 
at last, "when almaist in every private house the 
buike of God's law is red and understand in oure 
vulgarie language." ^ There are sermons in stones 
to-day for him who deciphers the inscriptions on the 
old houses in Edinburgh — " He that tholes (en- 
dures) overcomes"; "O magnify the I^ord with 
me, and let us exalt his name together " ; and many 
like them ; and Glasgow preserves the reverence 
paid in her earlier years to the same book in her 
municipal motto : " Ivct Glasgow flourish by the 
preaching of the word." ' 

The tragedies of life are not all on the battle- 

1 Edgar, p. 1 53. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 265 

field, or at the stake. The book which was equal 
only to the emergencies of our course, but failed 
in the daily round of trivial tasks, could never have 
won the place in our hearts which we now accord 
to the Bible. There is a wealth of meaning which 
only the simple annals of the people could ex- 
plain, in the phrase, "The Family Bible." That 
it is the book of the home and the household, is 
the best proof that it is the book for the heart. 

3. Quickened and maintained by the Bible, the 
spiritual life is nourished from the same source of 
life even to the last. ' ' Through the only merit 
of Jesus Christ, my Saviour," Shakespeare com- 
mends his soul into the hands of his Creator ; and 
in his confidence in the Advocate before the 
throne Raleigh takes his pilgrimage. To the 
sublime strains of the ninetieth Psalm, Hamp- 
den's troopers carry him to his last resting-place 
among the Chiltern hills. The hapless Elizabeth, 
daughter of Charles I., a captive pining away in 
Carisbrooke Castle, is found dead one morning, her 
head upon the Bible, open at the sentence, whose 
bidding she had gladly obeyed, Come unto me 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden^ and I will 
give you rest. Her brief and broken journey was 
over. Another pilgrim, worn out in his Master's 
service, John Bunyan, reaches the end with words 
which caught their inspiration from that Mas- 
ter's lips : "Take me, for I come to thee." The 



266 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

gates of the celestial city were opening for him, 
when McCheyne joyously exclaims : My soul is 
escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler ; 
the snare is broken^ and I aTn escaped. The most 
passionate lover of the country to whom our 
century has listened, Richard Jeflferies, dying in 
his prime, comes home to his Father, after years 
of wandering and homelessness, and passes away 
listening to the word of the Saviour about the 
decease which he would accomplish at Jerusalem. 
The greatest of Scottish philosophers, Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton, dies saying: Thy rod and thy 
staffs they comfort me ; as, a century or more 
earlier, he who ranks among the greatest of Eng- 
lish apologists — Bishop Butler — had found comfort 
at the last in the assurance that Jesus Christ 
was his personal Saviour, because it is written : 
Him, that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. 
The eminent chemist, Faraday, with the heart of 
a little child, recalls Paul's famous words, and 
describes himself as "just waiting" ; in the mighty 
confidence which follows these words, Spurgeon 
finds his order of release : / have fought a good 
fight^ I have finished 7ny course^ I have kept the 
faith. Henceforth^ cried Paul, as he lifted his 
eyes to the glory beyond ; and Whittier may have 
had the same passage in his mind in his final lines 
invoking the presence of the one Friend who could 
bring with him : 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 267 

Thy calm assurance of transcendent spheres, 
And the eternal years, 

as, without question, had Tennyson when, in words 
which will live as long as our language, he sang 
— true lover of the sea which girdles his island 
home : 

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar. 

What has been said in these pages fails of its 
main purpose if it stops short of the acknowledg- 
ment, that it is the spiritual influence of our Bible 
which makes it as powerful as it is. 

Undoubtedly, as Faber asserted, with its im- 
common beauty and marvelous English, it lives 
on the ear as music that can never be forgotten, 
*' so that its felicities often seem to be almost things 
rather than mere words. " But the great literary 
art of our Bible is not its chief excellence. 

Without doubt also, no book equals it in quicken- 
ing thought. It is supremely the book, which, not 
thinking for us, makes us think for ourselves ; dis- 
tinguished, Coleridge said, from all other writings 
pretending to inspiration by the strong and frequent 
recommendations of knowledge and a spirit of in- 
quiry. But admirable as is its stimulating virtue, 
not here does its great power lie. 

The history of two hemispheres testifies to its 



268 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

potency in molding tlie grandest national life. 
**So great is my veneration for the Bible," John 
Quincy Adams writes, ' ' that the earlier my chil- 
dren begin to read it the more confident will be 
my hopes that they will prove useful citizens to 
their country and respectable members of society." 
Andrew Jackson spoke words of truth, when in his 
last illness he declared this book to be " the rock 
on which our Republic rests." And yet, inter- 
woven though it be with the most heroic chap- 
ters in English and American history, this will 
not account for the hold our Bible has had upon 
our forefathers on both sides of the sea. 

'*I utterly dissent," Erasmus made bold to de- 
clare, "from those who are unwilling that the 
sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned, 
translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ 
had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be 
understood even by a few theologians, or as though' 
the strength of the Christian religion consisted 
in men's ignorance." A comparison of the lands 
where the Bible has freely circulated in the homes 
of the people with those in which it has been kept 
in the hands of the priests or locked behind the 
bars of a foreign tongue, will testify to the wisdom 
of what Erasmus said, and sustain the statement 
of Horace Greeley in our own times : '*It is im- 
possible to mentall}^ or socially enslave a Bible- 
reading people." The principles of the Bible are 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 269 

the groundwork of human freedom. But though 
this book beat in harmony with the passion for 
liberty which has been so victorious in the history 
of our race here and in the old world, this does not 
reveal to us the richest source of its wealth. 

Giving to the judgment of Coleridge already 
quoted, that " intense study of the Bible will keep 
any writer from being vulgar in point of style, ' ' a 
much broader significance than he intended, we 
may praise the Bible for its sway over our intel- 
lectual and moral aspirations. With John Stuart 
Mill we may believe that ' ' the Bible and Shakes- 
peare have done more than any other books for 
the English language, introducing into the soul 
of it such grand ideas expressed with such sublime 
simplicity." Even yet, however, we are left 
without the key to its incomparable power. No 
doubt the Bible merits -Ruskin's eulogium as " the 
guide of all the arts and acts of the world which 
have been noble, fortunate, and happy ' ' ; and 
multitudes of men and women are grateful that 
their experience has corresponded with that of 
Professor Stuart Blackie, when he says that his 
life has been cleansed and elevated, because — to 
use his own words : "I was not more than fifteen 
years old when I was moved to adopt the ideal 
ethics of the gospel as my test of sentiment and 
my standard of conduct ; and to this I adhered 
steadily thenceforward, just as a young seaman 



270 THE HISTORY OF THE ENG-LISH BIBLE. 

would stick to his compass and to his chart, and a 
young pedestrian to his map of an unknown 
country." But incalculable as is the moral po- 
tency of the Bible, not even this constitutes its 
loftiest claim to our reverence. 

We strike a chord even deeper when we speak 
of this book as the balm for so many of the ills 
to which our flesh is heir, the heart's-ease of in- 
numerable lives in every generation. "I am 
asked," Mr. Gladstone writes, "what is the remedy 
for the deeper sorrows of the human heart — what 
a man should chiefly look to in his progress 
through life as the power that is to sustain him 
under trials, and enable him manfully to con- 
front his afflictions. I must point to something 
which, in a well-known hymn is called, ' The old, 
old story,' told in an old, old book, and taught 
with an old, old teaching, which is the greatest 
and best gift ever given to mankind." Such words 
as these bring us within sight of the citadel ; but 
yet even they leave us still outside its walls. 

The secret of the Bible, its peculiar secret, is its 
supernatural grace. The Spirit breathes from its 
pages. We may have no human theory of inspi- 
ration, but was not Coleridge right when he said 
that *' the Bible without the Spirit is a sun dial by 
moonlight?" In her rich, deep voice, George 
Eliot, as her life drew to its close, would read 
daily from this book ' ' a very precious and sacred 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 271 

book to her, not only from early associations, but 
also from the profound conviction of its import- 
ance in the development of the religious life of 
man. ' ' To the end it will Ke true, as John Robin- 
son said to the Pilgrim Fathers when they em- 
barked on the Mayflower, that ' ' the I/)rd has 
more truth yet to break forth out of his holy 
word. ' ' After preaching the gospel for forty years, 
Spurgeon hands in his testimony : "I have only 
touched the hem of the garment of divine truth, 
but what virtue has flowed out of it. The word 
is like its Author — infinite, immeasurable, without 
end. " It is what no other book is, the authorita- 
tive voice to the soul. "I see," said the historian 
Hallam, ' ' that the Bible fits into every fold and 
crevice of the human heart. I am a man, and I 
believe that this is God's book because it is man's 
book. ' ' As Coleridge exclaimed, '^ This book finds 
me. " Is not this our evidence of its divine origin ? 
To listen to it is to have the spirit of questioning 
disarmed by ' ' the expulsive power of a new afiec- 
tion. ' ' Dr. Dale's experience is ours : "I think 
that the universal experience of devout Christians 
will sustain me when I say that in reading the 
New Testament the idea of the authority of the 
book, as a book, is hardly ever thought of The 
book, explain it how we may, vanishes. The 
truth I read there shines in its own light. . . 
Whether the writers of the New Testament are 



272 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

infallible or not, is a question which rarely occurs 
to me. Somehow, when they tell me a truth, I 
come to know it for myself : this truth is mine 
and not merely theirs. Practically, the Bible does 
not come between me and God," ^ This self-evi- 
dencing power the Bible offers to the humblest as 
well as to the profoundest of its readers. The poor 
woman in Cowper's poem stands in clearer light 
than does Voltaire, although she 

Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true ; 
A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew. 

Perhaps we have failed to appreciate at its full 
value the power of the inner life in the men who 
were foremost in giving us our English Bible. 
Tyndale was in solemn earnest when he closed his 
preface with Paul's request, '' Pray for us " ; and 
Purvey had not associated with Wycliffe in vain 
when he wrote of the qualifications for the true in- 
terpreter of Scripture : " He hath need to live a 
clean life and be full devout in prayers, and 
have not his wit occupied about Worldly things ; 
that the Holy Spirit, author of wisdom and knowl- 
edge and truth, dress him in his work, and suffer 
him not for to err. By this manner . . . men 
may come to true and clear translating and true 
understanding of Holy Writ, seem it never so 
hard at the beginning. " ^ To this spirit of self- 

1 " Protestantism; Its Ultimate Principles," pp. 50, 51. 
« Westcott, p. 21. 



THE BIBLE IN SPIRITUAL LIFE. 273 

surrender on the part of WyclifFe and Tyndale, 
and others who followed their lead, is it due that 
the Bible is so well able in our noble version to ex- 
plain itself. The wish of the old writer has been 
gratified, when he desired that the Scriptures 
might be "so purely and pliantly translated that 
it needed neither note, gloss, nor scholia ; so that 
the reader might once swim without a corke. ' ' ^ 
John Brown, of Harper's Ferry, wrote these true 
words in his prison Bible : ' ' There is no commen- 
tary in the world so good in order to a right under- 
standing of this blessed book, as an honest, child- 
like, and teachable spirit." 

We live in the day when, as never before, our 
English Bible circulates throughout the world. 
But let us remember that the multiplication of 
Bibles means the multiplication of witnesses rising 
to testify for us or against us. How pathetic the 
words which poor Hartley Coleridge wrote in his 
Bible, as from his twenty-fifth birthday he re- 
viewed a wasted life, 

When I received this volume small 

My years were barely seventeen 
When it was hoped I should be all 

Which once, alas, I might have been. 

And now my years are twenty-five, 
And every mother hopes her lamb, 

And every happy child alive. 
May never be what now I am. 

i Edgar, p. 150. 



274 THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 

We are reminded of another boy of higli prom- 
ise, a young Scottish poet who died on the thresh- 
old of life, with the prophecy of his boyhood all 
unfulfilled, and his Bible on his pillow, with 
these last lines penned by his feeble hand : 

'Tis very vain for me to boast 
How small a price my Bible cost ; 
The day of judgment will make clear 
'Twas very cheap — or very dear. 

In no better way can we close our study of the 
history and influence of the English Bible than 
with the comment of the man who more perhaps 
than any other, flung open the doors of this great 
treasure-house in the days of the Protestant Refor- 
mation. Erasmus pictures the true spirit in which 
the word of God must be studied when he says of the 
student coming to its pages : ' ' Let him approach, 
not with an unholy curiosity, but with reverence ; 
bearing in mind that his first and only aim and 
object should be that he may catch and be changed 
into the spirit of what he there learns. It is the 
food of the soul ; and to be of use must not rest 
only in the memory, but must permeate the 
very depths of the heart and mind." 



LITERATURE. 



The literature of the subject is very extensive. 
The writer desires to express his special obligation 
to the following books : 

Brief Notes on the Critical History of the 
Text and English Versions of Holy Script- 
ure. By Joseph Angus, M. A., D. D. London. 

The Annals of the English Bible. By Chris- 
topher Anderson. First edition. London, 1845. 

''English Bible." Encyclopedia Britannica. 
By the Rev. J. H. Blunt, M. A. 

Old Bibles : An Account of the Early Ver- 
sions OF the English Bible. By J. R. Dore. 
London, 1888. 

The English Bible. By John Eadie, D. D., 
LL. D. 2 Vols. London, 1876. 

The Bibles of England. By Andrew Edgar, 
D. D. London, 1889. 

A Handbook of the English Versions of the 
Bible. By J. I. Mombert, D. D. London, 1888. 

275 



276 LITERATURE. 

Companion to the Revised Version of the 
New Testament. By Alex. Roberts, D. D. 
New York, 1881. 

A Companion to the Greek Testament and 
the English Version. By Philip Schaff, D. D. 
New York, 1883. 

A Supplement to the Authorized English Ver- 
sion OF the New Testament. By the Rev. F. 
H. Scrivener, M. A. London, 1843. 

Our English Bible: Its Translations and 
Translators. By John Stoughton, D. D. 
London. 

A General View of the History of the Eng- 
lish Bible. By Brooke Foss Westcott, B. D. 
London, 1868. 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Adams, John Quincy : on the 

Bible 268 

Addison, Joseph : " The spa- 
cious firmament," etc 196 

Aelfric, Abbot : translations 
from the Old Testa- 
ment 14,238 

Aidan, Bp., andLindisfame.. 4 

Aldhelm's Psalter 11 

Aldred : his Anglo-Saxon 

gloss of the Gospels 14 

Alfred the Great 13, 224 

American Bible Union 157 

Anderson, Christopher : An- 
nals of the Bible Preface 

Arnold, Matt. : on the Bible 

and Conduct 243 

Art and the Bible 201 

Authorized Version 93 et seq. 

revisers of 98, 102 

instructions to 102 

published 105 

its reception :.... 106 

growing popularity of . , . . . . 107 
its style and sources of its 
strength.. 140, 141, 182, 183 



PAGE 

Ball, John : the mad priest 

of Kent 228 

Bede : work of. 12 

his death 13 

Beecher, H. W 234, 241 

Bible, The : the basis of 

Christian union 245 

Bishops' Bible, the 77 et seq. 

English of. 139, 140 

character of l8l et seq. 

first completion in English 55 

and conduct 243 

the "Great" ^^ et seq. 

and national industry 241 

influence of on the lan- 
guage 1741?^ ssq- 

in English literature, 171 et seq. 
1 85 et seq. 

in the nation 223 et seq. 

origin of the title 18 

in spiritual life 249 et seq. 

Briggs, Governor: quoted... 241 

Bright, John 202, 205 

Bristol College, England : 
copy of Tyndale's Tes- 
tament in 39 

277 



278 



INDEX. 



PAGB 

Broughton, Hugh : translates 
parts of the Old Testa- 
ment 89 

Bryant : " Thanatopsis " 197 

Bunyan, John : forms his 

style on the Bible 206 

Burke, Edmund: quoted... 201 
Byron: indebted to the Bible 197 

Caedmon, versified histories 12 
Carlyle, Thomas: on Job,.. 204 
Caxton, William : his print- 
ing press in Westminster 9 
Chaucer : his use of Script- 
ure 16, 178, 231 

Chilling\\'orth, W., and " The 

Religion of Protestants " 215 
Civilizing influence of the 

Bible 22^ eiseq. 

Clough, A. H. : quoted 214 

Cobham, Lord, and his copy 

of Wyclifife's Gospels.... 227 
Colet, Dean : conversation 

of with a priest 252 

Constantinople: fall of. 207 

Coverdale, Miles : birthplace 

of 55 

training of 56 

work of as translator 57 

his first Bible 57-6o 

reception of first Bible of.. 61 

leaves England 71 

return and old age of. 73 

character and work of.. 73, 74 
peculiaritiesof his version.. 135 



PAGE 

Coverdale, Miles : the eager- 
ness of the people to 
read his Bible 252 

Cowper, William 196, 262 

Cranmer, Archbishop, 16, 57 

[and Coverdale] 60, 64 

Cromwell, Ohver : his appre- 
ciation of the Bible 260 

Cromwell, Thomas : favors 

Bible translation 56 

57, 60, 64, 66 
his fall 67 

Dickens, Charles : on the 
style of the New Testa- 
ment 191 

his respect for Scripture... 192 

Douay Old Testament 89 

Edward VI. : favorable to 

Bible revision 69 

the Bible at his coronation 229 
Elizabeth, Queen : her policy 77 
her copy of the New Testa- 
ment.... 260, 263 

Ellicott, Bp. : on the need 

for revision 147, 148 

promotes American co-op- 
eration 152 

English of the versions 131 etseq. 
Erasmus : impulse given by 
to the study of the New 

Testament 47, 208 

reverence of for the New 
Testament 250, 268, 274 



INDEX. 



279 



PAGE 

Everett, Edwaxd : on the 

Proverbs 203 

Flavel's text remembered 254 

Franklin, Sir John, and his 

Arctic explorers 239 

Franklin, Benjamin : quoting 

Habakkuk 205 

his paraphrase of Job 217 

Froude, J. A. : eulogy of 

Tyndale 182 

Garret : labors and suffer- 
ings of 41, 255 

Geneva : the home of the 

Protestant exiles 71 

Genevan Testament 72 

Bible, ibid. : its popularity.. 80 
described 136-139 

Great Bible, The 66-68, 213 

Gildas: quoted lo 

Gladstone, Hon. W. E. : on 

the Bible 270 

Gospels : early versions of , . . 13 

Handel : on the " Messiah ".. 213 
Henry VI H. : in relation to 

the Great Bible 67 

subsequent opposition to 

the English Bible 68 

Hereford, Nicholas de : dis- 
ciple of Wycliffe 23 

his work as a translator...23, 24 

Home, the, and the Bible 243 

Hunt, Holman : on " The 

Light of the World"... 210 



PAGB 

Hunter, William : martyr- 
dom of. 256 

Huss, John : testimony of 

to Wycliffe 29 

Huxley, Professor : on the 

Bible and English life... 244 

Irving, Washington : stimu- 
lated by the Bible 212 

Jackson, Andrew : on the 

Bible 268 

Jerusalem Chamber, the, 150, 167 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel : on 

Ruth 205 

Joye [or Roye] : Tyndale's 

amanuensis 37 

reprints Tyndale's New 

Testament 43 

Tyndale's feud with him.. 49-51 

Latimer, Hugh : sets up the 
Great Bible in Worces- 
ter monastery 68 

Liberty Bell, the 234 

Lindisfarne Abbey 1 1 

Lingard : on the influence of 

Wycliffe's Bible 23 

Livingstone, David, and the 

Psalms 261 

Maldon, William : martyr- 
dom of 258 

Manning, Cardinal : on the 

unchanging Bible 249 



280 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Manuscripts, Early 9 et seq. 

Manuscripts of Wycliffe's 

Bible still extant 255 

Mary, Queen : translating 

Gospel by John 260 

prohibits the reading of 

the Scriptures 70 

Matthew, Thos. : his Bible.. 63 

mystery about him 63 

Miller, Hugh : on the story 

of Joseph 211 

Milton, John: hymn of. 196 

on the Bible 20i 

More, Sir Thomas : opposes 
Tyndale's translation of 

the New Testament 40 

a patron of Coverdale 60 

Nix, Bishop : favors destruc- 
tion of Tyndale's Testa- 
ment 42 

Newman, Cardinal : on Bible 

translation 183 

Norman Conquest : its in- 
fluence on scholar- 
sMp 15, 225 

Parker, Archbishop 81 et seq^ 

Poetry, English, and the 

Bible....... 196 et seq. 

Printers' Errors 142-144 

Puritans : love of for the 

Bible 230 

Purvey, John: Bible transla- 
tor , 24 



PAGB 

Purvey, John : his principles 

of translation 24, 25 

his character 25 

Raleigh, Sir W. : quoted..203, 214 

Rogers, John 62 et seq. 

Revision : recommended in 

1645 Ill 

why? 112 et seq. 

Revised Version, the : reso- 
lution looking to 147 

a Committee of Revision 

formed 149 

American scholars co-oper- 
ate 152 et seq. 

time given to the work 

151 et seq. 

division of labor 156 

need of a Revision 157 

changes found in R. V 158 

New Testament published, 159 
entire Bible published...... 160 

Dean Burgon's attack on... 162 

other criticisms of. 162-164 

the English of the Revi- 
sion • 166 

eagerness to read 230 

Rheims New Testament 88 

Rushworth : version of the 

Gospels 13 

Ruskin, John : quoted 199 

204, 218, 262 

Science and the Bible 209 

Scott, Sir W. : his familiarity 
with the Bible 190 et seq. 



INDEX. 



281 



PAGE 1 

Shakespeare : liis use of the 1 

Bible 185 et seq. 

Smith, Prof. Geo. A. : on 

Proverbs 243 

Smith, Dr. Miles : " Address 
to the Reader," in the 

Authorized Version 104 

South, Robert : quoted 200 

Spenser, Edmund 212 

Stanley, Henry M. : experi- 
ence of with the Bible... 200 

Taverner, Richard : his Bible 65 
Tennyson : indebted to the 

Bible 197 et seq., 267 

Thackeray, W. M. : use of 

the Bible 194 et seq. 

Toleration: era of 233 

Tomson, Lawrence : transla- 
tion of New Testament.. 89 

Tunstall, Bishop 40, 67 

Tyndale, William : his life 

of ZZ et seq. 

aspires to give the Bible in 

English to the people... 34 
issues two editions of the 

New Testament 38 

publishes the Pentateuch,. 43 
revision of the New Testa- 
ment 43 

imprisonment and death 

of 44, 45 

his character 45 

superiority of his work 47 



PAGE 

Tyndale, William : the Eng- 
lish of his version... 1 34, 184 
influence on our language.. 180 
his version and the author- 
ized 181 

Ulfilas tianslating the Script- 
ures into Gothic .. . 175 

Webster, Daniel : a student 

of the Bible 201 

Wells Cathedral : west front.. 227 

Whittier and the Bible 236, 

263, 266 
Wilberforce, Bishop : resolu- 
tion of in convocation... 147 
Wolsey, Cardinal : perse- 
cuting Garrett 41 

alsoBames 5^ 

Wordsworth,William : ode of 

to immortality 197 

Wycliffe, John : hfe of... 21 et seq. 
translation of Apocalypse 

and Gospels by 22 

entire New Testament 22 

OldTestament 23 

assisted by Hereford 23 

his death 24 

traces of ecclesiastical in- 
fluence in his version... 26 

its beauty 26 

spread of his influence... 27-29 
178 
manuscripts of his Bible 
still extant 255 



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